SEO Cloaking & Personalization
Understand the difference between deceptive cloaking and legitimate personalization.
The Bottom Line
Cloaking is showing search engines a fake page to manipulate rankings. Tailor doesn't do that—it runs normal A/B tests and personalization on real, indexable pages, which Google explicitly allows.
What is SEO Cloaking?
SEO cloaking is showing one version of a page to search engines and a materially different version to users, with intent to manipulate rankings. This violates Google's spam policies.
Examples of Cloaking
- Bots see keyword-stuffed copy, users see a sales page
- Bots get static HTML, users get something unrelated after JS runs
- Detecting Googlebot and serving special-cased content
Intent matters. Cloaking is about deception, not personalization.
What Google Allows
Logged-in vs logged-out experiences, geo-based copy, ad-specific landing pages, UTM-based personalization—all fine. The crawler sees one valid version of the page, not a fake one.
Why Tailor is Safe
- Real, indexable pages — No "SEO fake page" vs "real page" split
- Context-driven, not bot detection — Tailor targets by intent, not user-agent
- Consistent core promise — Headlines and CTAs shift, but the product and offer stay the same
Google's test: "Would a human agree this page matches what the crawler indexed?" With Tailor, the answer is yes.
Patterns to Avoid
- Show different products to bots vs users
- Inject hidden SEO keyword blocks
- Detect bots and special-case them
Risk Level
Google sees millions of A/B tests daily. Penalties target obvious, aggressive manipulation—not normal personalization. Tailor sits squarely in the "normal modern web behavior" category.