Does this SEO practice have a name and is it “cloaking”?

Posted on 2011-12-29 23:01:13 by Ben Brocka
Last Updated: Aug 19, 2015Views: 540Votes: 4

So I Google search for a dictionary term, and none of the sites' Google snippets actually defines that term. Instead they are presented in this format:

enter image description here

Here's the actual page it links to from The Free Dictionary.

The term is used a lot in a block of text that teases the user into clicking the link, but the page doesn't visibly appear to have this content at all.

It entices the user and requires a click through for them to find the actual information they want. What is this called? Is this considered cloaking or is it otherwise a violation of SEO best practices?

1 answer

By CiaranBest answer

This is not cloaking.

The Free Dictionary is simply using the (well known) description meta-tag. Here is the full content of the tag on that page.

<meta name="description" content="Definition of in light of in 
the Idioms Dictionary. in light of phrase. What does in light 
of expression mean? Definitions by the largest Idiom Dictionary.">

The description meta-tag is one of the best places for page owners to craft how search results are presented in the Google SERPs. It's up to Google whether to use it or not, but in this case, Google has decided that this is an accurate and helpful representation of the content of the page.

The practice could be described a couple of ways, including 'meta tag optimisation' or 'search engine result presentation'. But it should be a standard part of your SEO toolkit.

2 similar answers  β 

By maythesource.com

As mentioned by the comment from swapnesh, you can use the javascript code here to get the time on the clients machine:

How can I get the user's local time instead of the server's time?

The effect of having a javascript that updates the div elements related to time (in order to be in the clients time) is negligible.

In addition, your javascript can check the user-agent: useragent detection to write javascript in order to further limit when the specific javascript is run (though is is overkill as most crawlers do not execute javascript_.

Finally, in relation to your use of the term cloaking, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking "Cloaking is an SEO optimization technique..."

By DisgruntledGoat

Hiding ViewState is unlikely to be seen as cloaking, as ViewState wouldn't be seen as content.

What exactly are your concerns with ViewState? If you are worried about the page speed then "cloaking" will not help you anyway. PageSpeed is measured by real visitors to your site who have the Google Toolbar.

So my suggestion would be either to get rid of ViewState entirely, or simply not worry about it and work on other issues like HTTP requests, making sure everything is gzipped, and cutting down on image size.

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