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Cloaking

Cloaking is showing search engines different content from what people see, to manipulate rankings and mislead users, which Google's spam policies forbid.

How it works

The server recognises a crawler by its user agent or IP address and serves it a different page from the one people get. Google’s examples: a page about travel for the crawler and one about discount drugs for people, or keywords inserted only when a search engine asks. Sites that break the spam policies may rank lower or drop out of results. Google finds them through automated systems and human review, which can end in a manual action.

A store can drift into this by accident. One route is a site that blocks or redirects visitors by country but lets Googlebot through. Googlebot’s default IP addresses appear to be in the US, and Google asks sites to treat it like any other visitor from the country it appears to come from.

Another route is a lighter page “for bots”. Google accepts a crawler version with similar content, as in dynamic rendering, but completely different content can count as cloaking. A real case and where the line runs: cloaking and scaled content in ecommerce.

Where you see it

  • Search Console: the URL Inspection tool shows the HTML Google rendered for a page, so you can compare it with what a visitor gets.

Not to be confused with

  • Misrepresentation — a Merchant Center policy about what the store tells shoppers: who it is, prices, delivery, returns. Cloaking is about what the site shows the crawler.
  • Scaled content abuse — many pages made mainly to rank, without value for users. People and Googlebot see the same pages.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Any difference between what Googlebot and a person see is cloaking.” Right: Google’s definition includes the intent to manipulate rankings and mislead users. Dynamic rendering with similar content is not treated as cloaking, and neither is a paywall whose full content Google can see when the site follows Flexible Sampling guidance.
  • Wrong: “Nobody on our team set up cloaking, so the site has none.” Right: Google notes that it is not uncommon for hackers to use cloaking to make the hack harder for the owner to detect.

Sources