Definition

Cloaking is the practice of presenting different content or URLs to search engines than to human users, with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead visitors. Google lists it as a violation of its spam policies.

Google's example of cloaking is a page that shows travel-related content to crawlers while displaying unrelated promotions to people. The distinction Google draws is intent: serving adapted content for legitimate reasons, such as showing localised pricing or handling logged-in users, is not cloaking when the same treatment applies to Googlebot and users alike. Cloaking becomes a policy violation when the differing content is designed to deceive search engines.

Examples

• Deceptive content swap

  A page returns an article about hiking trails when requested by Googlebot but serves a gambling advertisement to a normal browser, which Google treats as cloaking.

• Not cloaking

  A news site that shows the same paywalled article structure to both Googlebot and signed-out users, following Google's flexible sampling guidance, is not cloaking.

Sources

• Google Search Central — Spam policies: Cloaking

Related terms

• Spam Policies
  Google's published rules describing behaviours and techniques that can lower a site's ranking or remove it from search results.
• Doorway Page
  A page created mainly to rank for specific queries and funnel visitors to another destination rather than serve them directly.
• Sneaky Redirect
  A redirect that sends users to content different from what they or search engines were led to expect, to deceive.
• Hidden Text
  Text or links placed on a page so search engines can read them but human visitors cannot, used to manipulate rankings.
• Manual Action
  A penalty applied by a Google reviewer when a site is found to violate the search spam policies, demoting or removing affected pages from results.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• SEO Audit
• Crawling & Indexing