Cloaking and Doorways
A rival page ranks well for "snake plant care". When Asha clicks it, she lands on a page full of discount banners with no care information at all. The search engine was shown an article; she was shown an advert. That mismatch has a name, and it is one of the most serious violations there is.
The rule
Show the bot what you show the person; build pages for people, not queries.
Cloaking means serving search engines one thing and people another, to rank for content visitors never get. The usual method is to detect the crawler, by its name or its network address, and hand it a keyword-rich page while people get something else. A close relative is the sneaky redirect: the engine indexes one page, but visitors are quietly sent somewhere different.
Not everything that varies is cloaking. Adapting the layout for phones, or showing prices in the visitor's currency, is fine as long as a crawler in the same situation would receive what a person would. The test is equal treatment.
Doorway pages are pages made to rank for many similar searches, each adding little of its own, which all lead visitors to the same place. The classic example is a set of city pages built from one template:
/snake-plant-delivery-pune
/snake-plant-delivery-mumbai
/snake-plant-delivery-nagpur
...200 more, identical except for the city nameIf each page only swaps the city name and then pushes people to the same product page, they are doorways. Compare Leafline's page for its Pune nursery, with its real address, opening hours, stock and directions. That page is genuine, because it offers something no other page on the site does.
The shortcut
Two quick tests:
- Same-seat test (cloaking): if a person and a crawler visited from the same place on the same kind of device, would they get the same content? If not, it is cloaking.
- Delete-the-keyword test (doorways): remove the query words from a page. Is anything left that its sibling pages do not have? If not, it is a doorway.
The proposal
An agency offers to create 200 "snake plant delivery in [city]" pages for Leafline.
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
A site shows crawlers a text article but shows visitors a page of ads. What is this?
Which of these is NOT cloaking?
200 city pages differ only in the city name and all push visitors to the same product. What are they?
What makes Leafline's Pune nursery page legitimate?
Remember
- Show the bot what you show the person; build pages for people, not queries.
- Same-seat test for cloaking; delete-the-keyword test for doorways.
- The trap: template city or keyword pages that differ in a single word.