'Cloaking'

[water]

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

- Google Quality Guidelines

If I understand it right, pages that google crawls should look exactly the same as what a normal user would see, content-wise?

I'm wondering to what extent would Google allow leniency... if there's any chance that a couple of links shown to G only would be in violation.

I'm asking because of another site, which is quite large, where a few extra links/options show up when I change my user-agent to GoogleBot, as well as an Adsense ad being replaced by a normal one. I didn't check the source though but I doubt there's any text hidden by css which is visible to google.

Any thoughts?

[bogs]

cloaking is bad, but it is depends how you use it, most of the time is has bad effect... so far SE are to smart to recognize hidden text..

[guinanie]

Cloaking is a black hat technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser. Cloaking may harm your site

[lordofdalord]

Cloaking is a smart Bh technique which can get you lot of traffic in less amount of time . I still use cloaking if anybody wants any informationon it they can pm me .

[x3mario]

Cloaking - also known as "stealth," involves serving a specific page to each search engine spider and a different one to human visitors. In most cases, frowned upon by search engines.

It is a black hat search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.

When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

[Steven_D]

Originally Posted by x3mario

Cloaking The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

depends heavily on the context, if the purpose is to deceive the SE then yeah fine, but hundreds of sites well indexed by G cloak their information.

a perfect example is experts-exchange.com massive site and recently they started charging for registration so they dont just display information to everyone, but they still need their pages indexed.

They are cloaking, you can tell because if you find a link to something you want to know you can go to google, and do site: domain page name it will come up and you can click cached page and voila you have free access to experts exchange.

Not every website gives away information for free but they still need indexing. Infact even phpbb the forum software can lock down a forum so you have to be registered to view the info but it lets the diff search bots index it no worries.

If you ADD content that is only visible to a search engine then yes, you would be acting in a sneeky manor and you should get your ass kicked

[kenneth.robert]

In a very simple word we can say that cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser.

[coolslko]

Originally Posted by water

If I understand it right, pages that google crawls should look exactly the same as what a normal user would see, content-wise?

I'm wondering to what extent would Google allow leniency... if there's any chance that a couple of links shown to G only would be in violation.

I'm asking because of another site, which is quite large, where a few extra links/options show up when I change my user-agent to GoogleBot, as well as an Adsense ad being replaced by a normal one. I didn't check the source though but I doubt there's any text hidden by css which is visible to google.

Any thoughts?

Cloaking is all about displaying different content to search engines and to its users with purpose to get quick and higher ranking on search engines but must avoid it as it is black hat SEO technique and your site can be penalised as soon search engines detect it on your site.........

[coolguy27]

Cloaking actually is not bad. It depends on how you use it....If for SE manipulation then its bad...

[livePR.ezer.com]

Originally Posted by water

......I change my user-agent to GoogleBot, .......
Any thoughts?

As you know how to change user-agent or add "GoogleBot".

I believe that smart G also know how to change user-agent or hide "GoogleBot" too.

[eshop600]

Seems to be a lot of conflicting advice here, if experts exchange are doing it and still getting indexed why cant we all do it?

[temyong]

Cloaking for me is not a healthy ways of technique black hat always use this.

[coolguy27]

Cloaking does not always mean is site is trying to trick a search engine robot, sites may cloak their site for different browsers, depending on what technologies they support...

You can see yahoo.com is cloaking so it means that cloaking is not really bad at all, it is how to use it...

Use this checker:
http://www.cloakingdetector.com/

The result:

This page looks different to Googlebot than to regular users: this could mean that this page does cloaking (See: What is Cloaking?). Specifically:

Analyzed code is similar only at 35.48%

Received text is similar only at 29.05%

That's why cloaking is depending on how it is being used....

[tomfrederick]

Cloaking is a technique of delivering a certain set of pages to search engine crawlers, while at the same time delivering a completely different set of pages to your human visitors. To avoid cloaking is good, it is strongly forbidden by most major search engines

[full house]

cloaking is not advisable! you might hurt your site! Its a black hat and must not be practice!

[2mymall]

Cloaking is bad cause google says so.

But I'm sure google won't mind if you serve content according to the country the user resides in. Don't think this can be considered as cloaking.

[arcel]

Cloaking is a system of delivering custom content to a spider but hiding the code and / or content from a user.

[btcollins]

Cloaking is not a good thing for seo

If you have great content on your website then why would you want

to hide it and show the spiders something else anyway?

[Seo Madrid]

I'll have to disagree with most of the posts. I've used ethical cloaking on my sites with very good results. Basically, the URLs of my site use different partner references and IDs, so it was creating duplicate content issues. Some of the references triggered co-brands, pages with very similar content but slightly different look&feel. So I started to use the user agent detection to strip out all the dynamic bits of the URLs and the results are great. So, as someone said above, cloaking is only bad when you use it to trick the SE and boost your rankings.

[temyong]

If you are a potential client trying to click some site and all of a sudden cloaking occurs what do you feel?