Technical SEO
Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique where the content served to search engine crawlers is different from what is presented to human users, typically to manipulate search rankings by showing keyword-rich content to bots while displaying unrelated content to visitors. It is a direct violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Google detects cloaking through manual quality reviews and algorithmic systems including the Google Search Quality team. Sites suspected of cloaking can be tested using tools that simulate Googlebot's user agent, and penalties are applied manually via Google Search Console.
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Black Hat SEO
Refers to malicious activities for manipulating search engine results.
Technical SEO
Dynamic Rendering
An intermediate solution developed to facilitate the crawling of bots on JavaScript-based sites.
Technical SEO
Googlebot
Refers to the software developed by Google to create a searchable index and crawl the web.
Technical SEO
Robots.txt File
A plain-text file at the root of a domain that uses the Robots Exclusion Protocol to tell compliant crawlers which paths they may or may not request.