Unethical Website Practices: Cloaking

Cloaking is considered a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) method used to artificially boost a website's ranking. A website is said to be cloaked when one page is shown to a user and another page is shown to a search engine.

So let's say, we wanted to see a topic on fear and we know that website X have it. We go directly to website X, the page we see is the real page. However a lot of the time we forget the exact website so we use a search engine like Google or Yahoo. Using a search engine, we search for the word "fear" and we will be presented a list of websites with the topic of fear and when we click on what we think is website X, we get redirected to another page which is totally different from what we expected.

This is the result of cloaking. Cloaking is just one way website owners and designers' manipulate search engines to get better ranking results.

Therapeutic standards check our members' websites to ensure they do not engage in Cloaking. Become a member of the Therapeautic Standards Scheme now and show your clients you are an ethical therapist and do not engage in the unethical practices yourself. Show you are different from rogue therapy websites and carry the Therapeutic Standards Verifications Mark.