GlossarySEO
What is cloaking in SEO?
Also called: SEO cloaking, user-agent cloaking, sneaky redirects
Definition
Cloaking is showing search engines different content from what users see, in order to manipulate rankings. It's a named violation in Google's spam policies and can lead to a manual action.
Cloaking, explained
Google's spam policies define cloaking as presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings. Its examples: showing a page about travel destinations to search engines while showing a page about discount drugs to users, and inserting text or keywords into a page only when the requester is a search engine. The policies list sneaky redirects separately, like sending mobile visitors to a spam domain while desktop users see the normal page.
Intent and difference are what count. Many legitimate setups vary what's served. Responsive layouts change by screen size. Paywalls show crawlers the full article with appropriate structured data. Geolocation changes currency. Google's dynamic rendering documentation says Googlebot generally doesn't consider dynamic rendering to be cloaking as long as it produces similar content, and gives the counter-example of serving cats to users and dogs to crawlers.
Cloaking also happens without the owner knowing. Hacked sites often serve spam pages only to Googlebot so the owner never sees them in a browser. If Search Console shows queries or pages you don't recognize, inspect them with URL Inspection, which shows what Google actually fetched.
The safe rule: whatever Googlebot gets should be what a user on the same device gets, allowing for personalization that doesn't change what the page is about.
Why it matters for founders
Some "SEO hacks" sold to founders are cloaking under another name, like pages stuffed with keywords only for bots. The downside is a manual action that's slow to undo.
Example
A plugin offers to show Googlebot a keyword-rich version of your homepage while users see the designed one. That's cloaking. You skip it and put the useful text in the real page instead.
Common mistakes
- Serving bots a different, keyword-heavy version of a page.
- Assuming dynamic rendering is cloaking when content matches.
- Not checking what Googlebot sees on a hacked or compromised site.
- Redirecting crawlers and users to different destinations.
Sources
- Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search
- Google Search Central: Dynamic rendering as a workaround
Checked
Related terms
- Manual actionA manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google when pages on a site break Google's spam policies. Affected pages rank lower or disappear until you fix the issue and request review.
- User agentA user agent is the software making a web request, identified by the
User-AgentHTTP header. Browsers and crawlers each send their own string, and robots.txt rules target crawlers by their user-agent token. - Dynamic renderingDynamic rendering is serving crawlers a prerendered HTML version of a JavaScript page while users get the normal client-side app. Google now calls it a workaround, not a long-term solution.
- URL Inspection toolURL Inspection is a Search Console tool that shows Google's indexed view of one URL, including index status, Google-selected canonical and last crawl, and can run a live test or request indexing.