Glaring Omission from Google’s Cloaking Examples

I was reading through Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for the section that said, “do not cloak your site by giving search engines text content but giving users a login screen.” I wanted to give someone a definitive answer on why they could not cloak their content by presenting a login screen to human visitors. But it doesn’t say anything about that on the cloaking guidelines.

Google only says:

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
• Serving different content to search engines than to users.

I think that one of the most annoying and common examples of cloaking is clicking through Google’s search results and landing on a login page that says “you need to subscribe to access this content”, or “you need to register to access this content”.

I think the reason that Google doesn’t use the example of cloaking with a login page, is because Google selectively approves of certain types of cloaking.

I just wanted to add my complaint to the many other complaints out there.

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