Cloaking
Showing different content to search engines than to users. A black hat technique that violates Google's guidelines. If you're doing this, stop.
Why It Matters
Cloaking is deception, plain and simple. It means serving one version of a page to Googlebot and a completely different version to human visitors. The goal is usually to rank for keywords that have nothing to do with the actual page content.
Google considers cloaking a severe violation. It undermines the entire premise of search - that the page you see in results is the page you'll land on. Getting caught means a manual action penalty, which can remove your entire site from search results.
In Practice
Don't do it. That's the practical advice.
But you should know what it looks like, because sometimes cloaking happens accidentally. Server-side rendering that shows different content based on user-agent can technically be cloaking if the Googlebot version differs significantly from the user version. IP-based redirects that send Googlebot to a different page than users are cloaking.
If you're doing any server-side user-agent detection, make sure the content Googlebot sees is the same content users see. Use Google's URL Inspection tool in Search Console to verify.
Related Terms
Glossary
Black Hat SEO
SEO tactics that violate search engine guidelines - fast gains, brutal penalties.
Glossary
Googlebot
Google's web crawler that discovers, downloads, and indexes your pages.
Glossary
JavaScript SEO
Optimising JS-heavy sites so search engines can actually see and index the content.
Glossary
Crawling
How search engine bots discover and download your pages - the first step to ranking.
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