Bad Cloaking Experiment: Do search engines see the same content as users?

Cloaking refers to making search engines see different content than ordinary users. It is a common black hat SEO practice that attempts to manipulate rankings.

The original post contained a summary of the experiment: the experimental website first blocked the content from human visitors, and then used a URL inspection tool to confirm that Googlebot saw different content than ordinary users.

Website traffic gradually decreased during the observation period, but there were no immediate drastic changes that could be attributed solely to cloaking.

The authors of the experiment speculated that interactive factors such as users quickly returning to search results may be related, but also admitted that other variables such as core algorithm updates cannot be ruled out.

The value of such cases is to remind us how to read SEO experiments: record operations, observations and inferences separately, and do not directly regard the time series changes of a single website as a causal relationship that has been confirmed by search engines.

What is preserved here is the research context and critical reading method, and cloaking or other operations that violate search engine guidelines are not encouraged.