What is cloaking in SEO?
Cloaking means showing search engines different content or redirects from what human visitors see. It is a spam technique and a common sign of a hacked website.
Cloaking is serving different content to search engine crawlers than to human visitors. Search engines treat it as spam and can remove a site from results for it.
Why it matters to site owners
Cloaking is often not done by the owner. Attackers who compromise a site inject spam pages or links that are shown only to Googlebot, or redirect only visitors arriving from search results. The owner visits the site, sees nothing wrong, and the hack goes unnoticed for months.
How it is detected
Compare what a crawler and a browser receive for the same URL: status codes, redirect destinations and content. Spam keywords that appear only in the crawler's version are a strong signal.
Related
- Redirect and cloaking checker
Free cloaking checker. Wardzo compares what Googlebot and a normal browser see on your homepage to detect hidden SEO spam, sneaky redirects and other signs of a hacked site.
- WordPress and site owner monitoring
Outside-in monitoring for WordPress and other long-running websites. Wardzo finds exposed config backups, SEO spam and cloaking, expiring SSL and downtime, without installing a plugin.
- What are source maps, and are public source maps a risk?
Source maps are .map files that map minified JavaScript back to the original source code. Publicly served production source maps expose your full front-end source.