{"id":29953,"date":"2024-11-12T12:40:03","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T12:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/blog\/wiki\/cloaking\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T12:12:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T12:12:29","slug":"Cloaking","status":"publish","type":"wiki","link":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/wiki\/Cloaking","title":{"rendered":"Cloaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is cloaking?<\/span><\/h2>\n

In SEO, cloaking is the practice of showing a different page to search engine crawlers<\/a> than to users. This makes it possible to show pages with different content, different links, or even completely different pages, allowing website owners to manipulate a website\u2019s rankings in the SERPs<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

When different content is served to search engine crawlers than to normal website visitors, cloaking is generally considered a black hat SEO<\/a> practice by search engines<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Search engine guidelines and cloaking<\/span><\/h2>\n
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\"Cloaking<\/a> <\/p>\n
Figure:<\/b> Cloaking – White Hat – Author: Seobility – License: CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

When different content is served to search engines and normal users, cloaking is always considered against search engine guidelines. However, Google has stated that cloaking is only against guidelines when specifically targeting their crawler and may not be considered black hat if it has been done to improve the user experience<\/a> of a website.[1]<\/a><\/sup>\n<\/p>\n

There are instances where serving different content to different users can be beneficial for the user experience and therefore isn\u2019t against their guidelines. For example:\n<\/p>\n