Cloaking

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is showing different content or URLs to search engines than to visitors, for example by serving a different page based on the user agent or IP address. Google treats cloaking as a violation of its spam policies. It can lead to a manual action or removal from the search results.

Why is cloaking important?

• High risk: Google can remove pages or the whole site from the search results.
• It misleads visitors: what appears in the results does not match what they see.
• It can happen unnoticed: hacked sites sometimes contain hidden cloaking.

Examples of cloaking

• A page shows Googlebot text about health insurance while visitors see a gambling page.
• A site redirects visitors to a different page than the one Google has seen.
• Not cloaking: a version tailored to language or device, as long as the content is equivalent.

How do you avoid cloaking?

Show search engines and visitors the same content. Check pages with the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console and compare what Google sees with what a visitor sees. If you suspect a hack, have your site and plugins checked. Checks like these are part of technical SEO.