Examples of cloaking#
- Serving a keyword-rich text page to Googlebot but a Flash, image-only or completely different page to users.
- Showing a clean article to search engines and a casino or pharma page to visitors.
- Hacked sites that show spam only to search engine user agents (often called “Japanese keyword hack” and similar).
- Redirecting users to another domain while search engines see the original page (sneaky redirects).
What is not cloaking#
| Acceptable | Why |
|---|---|
| Responsive or adaptive designs for mobile and desktop | Same content, different presentation |
| Showing local currency or language based on location | Fine if Googlebot can access all versions (use hreflang) |
| Paywalled content with structured data | Google’s flexible sampling / paywall markup is designed for this |
| Personalisation for logged-in users | Not targeted at search engines |
How to check your site#
- Use Search Console URL Inspection → “View crawled page” and compare with what you see in a browser.
- Search
site:yourdomain.comfor unfamiliar spam titles. - Check Security issues and Manual actions reports.
- If hacked, clean the site, update everything, change passwords and request a review.
Related: black hat SEO, manual action, user agent.