Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Web Spam team, posted an informational video about Cloaking today. The video is below and we've summarized the main points for you. Cloaking is basically showing content to users that is different than the content you show to Google. We see (and hear questions about) this all the time. People are always asking us whether they can just include a ton of keywords in the code and hide it from the user - this is cloaking. Watch the video for more information.

Google's Definitive Cloaking Video

Main Points Of This Video

• Cloaking is showing different content to users than GoogleBot
• Cloaking Violation of Quality Guidelines
• Cloaking is High Risk - it might lead Google to punish your site by lowering your search rankings.
• It Is Often Used For Deceptive Reasons

We hope this short video helps to clear up some common questions about a search engine optimization technique that used to be common, but now can really hurt your placement in the search engines.