Cloaking

What Hacker News said

Cites Matt_Cutts · 2012-05 · on “Split Testing May Cause Google to Accidentally Think You’ve Been Compromised”

Hi saurik, that's one of the earliest videos I ever taped, back in 2006: [LINK] I had to move that video over from video.google.com, which is why the YouTube date appears more recent. I should probably make a new video or blog post about A/B testing, but I can try to summarize here. In the original video, I said: - it's nice if you can A/B test on a part of your site that Google doesn't see. Then it's a moot point for us. - failing that, it's helpful to do something server-side. - don't do anything special for Googlebot. The state of A/B testing has evolved quite a bit in the last six years though. If I were making a fresh video, I'd say: A/B testing is a perfectly fine thing to do. You can

Cites eksith · 2013-08 · on “Tell HN: Add ?share=1 to Quora URLs to display content without login”

Not according to Matt Cutts : [this video] "Cloaking is essentially serving different content to users than Googlebot". I'm a user who cannot view Quora content that Googlebot has indexed even though it was a result Google said matched my query. This result is therefore unusable without modifying the URL or signing in. That is the definition of different content , HTML/CSS/JS or other semantics be damned, and a poor user experience. And that's something Google is allegedly trying to avoid. The Matt Cutts video also talks about mobile user experiences. If I worked for Quora, I'd pay close attention as I cannot view the site at all without getting their mobile app even though, again, Google said "y

Cites jobigoud · 2019-11 · on “Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results”

This behavior is known as "cloaking", and it is in direct violation of Google’s Guidelines. [this video]

Cites tyingq · 2023-02 · on “Chrome DevTools, Scroll Into View gets around paywalls”

It's also true that they say "cloaking" isn't allowed, "any type of cloaking" [this video]