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Grade AR-134Policies

Cloaking and hidden text

Google's spam policies name cloaking (presenting different content to users and search engines to manipulate rankings, e.g. inserting text only when the requester is a search engine), hidden text and link abuse, doorway abuse, sneaky redirects and keyword stuffing. Accordions, tabs, sliders, tooltips and screen-reader-only text are explicitly not violations, and a paywall is not cloaking if Google sees the full gated content and the site follows Flexible Sampling. A multi-perspective fetch can reveal cloaking when a crawler-identified view differs in substance from the user view.

Sources

  1. 1
    Google Search Central · 2026Spam policies: cloakingdevelopers.google.com
  2. 2
    Google Search Central · 2026Spam policies: hidden text and link abusedevelopers.google.com

AGrade A: official documentation or a standard. A grade describes the provenance of the sources above; it is not a probability that a change will work. The effect basis says how the size of the effect is known: measured by a study, taken from an industry report, only documented without a size, or not quantified.

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