A website that returns altered webpages (different contents) to search engines crawling the site is known as cloaking. In other words, a human reading the site would see different contents or information than a search engine robot/crawler reading the site.
Most of the time, cloaking is implemented in order to improve search engine ranking by misleading the search engine robot into thinking the content on the page is different than it really is.
Cloaking can be a dangerous method of getting listed in the search engines and may not be recommended.
How to identify if your website is Clocking ?
To identify if your website is serving two different contents for end user and search engine robot/crowler, we suggest to run your website / webpage using following URL,
1. https://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561346-cloaking-checker.aspx
Copy paste, your URL and click “Check”
if your website is clocking, you may see result like below,
2. You can use https://sitechecker.pro , once you see the SEO report generated by this website, if your website is clocking, it may show something like below,
Bot check – GoogleGoogle: page isn’t same.
Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides users with different results than they expected.
If your site uses technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash, see Google recommendations for making that content accessible to search engines and users without cloaking.We check your page under Google bot and verify number of scripts and backlinks. Total amount of backlinks should be the same for all user agents
How to avoid clocking ?
If you have used https://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561346-cloaking-checker.aspx for testing clocking, you will see it shows two html contents, one as seen by user’s browser and one as seen by bot/crawlers, so you have to take take a difference between these two versions of same html contents served as different at different occasion and see what is changing in run time and correct the same.
