Google On Cloaking & IP Delivery

Apr 21, 2006 - 2:06 pm 1 by
Filed Under Cloaking

Matt Cutts and Google have always had a strong stance of any form of cloaking, for as long as I have been covering the search industry. While I was away, Matt Cutts posted a comment at his blog where he provided the "short answer from Google’s perspective."

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this.

It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that's cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be "if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages."

So IP delivery is fine, but don't do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

It all comes down to intent, as Cre8asite Forum Site Admin says in the forum thread named Final word on cloaking?

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 9, 2026

Feb 9, 2026 - 10:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google On If A Younger Web Site Can Beat An Older Website In Search

Feb 9, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google

Google AI Overviews Tests Contextual Overlay Link Cards

Feb 9, 2026 - 7:41 am
Google

Google Preferred Sources Deeplink Button Is Broken

Feb 9, 2026 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads API Developer Token Access Applications Delayed

Feb 9, 2026 - 7:21 am
Search Engine Optimization

Reddit On Google & ChatGPT AI Responses Citations & Lack Of Links

Feb 9, 2026 - 7:11 am
 
Previous Story: The Essential Google Primer Lifeline