Cloaking: Cloaking is a method used by some websites to display different content to search engines and searchers. For the most part, cloaking is considered a black hat tactic, meaning that it is generally only used for malicious purposes; however, some forms of cloaking are not deceptive.
Cloaking is sometimes referred to as a spamdexing technique, meaning that it tricks search engines to give it a higher result. A popular form of cloaking sometimes involves redirecting users to a pornographic website, even though they have searched for non-pornographic results. Once discovered by a search engine like Google, a website that is found using cloaking will often be banned from further search results.
Some brands use company methods similar to cloaking in order to display content based on a user's IP address. This practice is referred to as IP delivery. An example of this includes using a user's IP address to determine what content to display to the user, such as with an online store like Amazon. Online shoppers in North America might see and purchase different products than someone in Europe, even though they are both looking at the same company's website. These types of websites are not banned from Google results because they are not acting with deceptive intent.