Cloaking is a technique used by some web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing (or a page for each search engine for even more optimization), while serving an entirely different page to human visitors. Usually, this is an attempt to get higher search engine ranking.
There are opposing views as to whether or not cloaking is ethical. Opponents see it as a bait-and-switch, where a web server is scripted to look out for search engines that are spidering in order to create an index of search results. The search engine thinks it is selecting a prime match to its request; however, the search result is misleading because the page that the spider sees does not correspond to the page that human visitors see.
Some search engines, such as Google, ban cloaked web sites in attempts to improve the quality of its search results.
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Can I have a clarification here.. Does this applies to referral links or just for cloaking a website with a different website? for example cloaking hahaha.com?ref=sdadsa with hahaha.com will still bring visitors to the same target.
@Ridhuan – This is different from link masking which is what you’re referring to. Cloaking is when you let the human visitors see one thing and the search engines see something else entirely in the hope of improving your search engines ranking.