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How does Google Know you are Cloaking?

I can't seem to find any information on how google determines if you are cloaking your content. How, from a technical standpoint, do you think they are determining this? Are they sending in things other than the googlebot and comparing it to the googlebot results? Do they have a team of human beings comparing? Or can they somehow tell that you have checked the user agent and executed a different code path because you saw "googlebot" in the name?

It's in relation to this question on legitimate url cloaking for seo. If textual content is exactly the same, but the rendering is different (1995-style html vs. ajax vs. flash), is there really a problem with cloaking?

Thanks for your put on this one.

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Lance Avatar asked Dec 10 '09 02:12

Lance


People also ask

Why is cloaking not recommend by Google?

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.


1 Answers

Google does hire contractors (indirectly, through an outside agency, for very low pay) to manually review documents returned as search results and judge their relevance to the search terms, quality of translations, etc. I highly doubt that this is their only tool for detecting cloaking, but it is one of them.

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Dave Sherohman Avatar answered Sep 21 '22 17:09

Dave Sherohman