Dynamic rendering
Serving a server-rendered HTML version to crawlers and a client-rendered version to users; Google now describes it as a deprecated…
Crawling Indexing
Cloaking
Presenting different content or URLs to search engines than to users with the intent to manipulate rankings; a Google spam policy violation.
In full
Cloaking is defined by intent and by material difference: serving text to crawlers that users never see, redirecting bots and humans to different destinations, or detecting Googlebot's IP range to swap content. Legitimate variation — personalisation, A/B tests with proper canonicalisation, geolocation redirects applied equally to users and crawlers, paywalls implemented with the flexible-sampling and paywalled-content structured data — is not cloaking. Enforcement can result in a manual action or removal from the index.
Example
A hacked site serves normal content to visitors but pharmacy spam to Googlebot, detectable only via the URL Inspection live test.
Related terms
Manual action
A demotion or removal applied by a human reviewer at Google for a spam policy violation, reported in Search Console with a reconsideration…
Google spam policies
Google's documented list of behaviours that can cause lower rankings or removal, covering cloaking, doorways, hacked content, keyword…
Doorway pages
Pages or sites created to rank for many similar queries and funnel users to a single destination, providing no unique value themselves.
URL Inspection tool
A Search Console feature showing Google's indexed state for a URL plus a live test with rendered HTML, screenshot, and page resource…
Where to read more
- Spam Policies for Google Web Search · Guideline · developers.google.com