Summary: To tell if a website is using cloaking techniques, you can switch your user agent to Googlebot. You’ll then usually be able to see the site just like Google does.
Firstly, what is cloaking? Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique where the content that the user sees is different to the content that the search engine ‘bot’ sees. It’s achieved by the website checking either the IP address or User-Agent HTTP header of the user that visits the page. If the user is identified as a search engine spider, a server side script delivers a different version of the page to them. The reason some people do this with their websites is usually to gain an SEO advantage – they might try to include content, for example, that makes no sense to a regular user, in order to trick the search engine into believing that the page is highly relevant for a particular term – when it isn’t. You should never try and use cloaking because you risk getting temporarily or permanently delisted from Google.
If you think a website is using cloaking, you can report them to Google here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.
If you want to look at a website as Google would, you can edit your User Agent String in Firefox so that, as far as the site you’re visiting is concerned, you’re Google.
How to edit the User Agent string
Step 1:Type about: in the address bar on Firefox. Make a note of the original value of your user agent, so you can restore it later (you’ll get the Firefox about page and it’s the value of ‘Build identifier:’ that you want).
Step 2: Type about:config in the address of FireFox.
Step 3: Right click and select NEW > STRING
Step 4: Enter the preference name “general.useragent.override”, without the quotes.
Step 5: Enter “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”, without the quotes.
Step 6: Check it’s worked by typing about: in the address bar again (you’ll get the Firefox about page and if you’re lucky, you’ll see ‘Build identifier: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)’ underneath’)
Help .. I’m using cloaking techniques and I didn’t even know!
Remove all instances of this from your site. If you have been delisted from Google, you can submit your site for reconsideration. If you’re lucky, Google will recognise that you’ve removed the made the changes and will add you to their index again – but expect it to take a fair while before you see your site included in the listings again!
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