Why it matters
Cloaking, presenting different content to users and to search engines to manipulate rankings and mislead users, and doorways, sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar queries that lead users to intermediate pages less useful than the final destination, are spam types in Google's spam policies and on its Day 3 spam slide.
How to meet it
Never branch on the Googlebot user agent or Google's IP ranges to change text, links or redirects. Do not generate near-identical city or keyword landing pages that funnel visitors to one destination; merge them into one useful page per real offering.
How to test it
The HTML served to a Googlebot user agent and to a browser have the same main content, links and redirects, and URL Inspection's rendered HTML matches what users see.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents01
Claims in the knowledge base04
- D3-C277ConfirmedWhat are quality updatesShown on screen
- D3-C278ConfirmedWhat are quality updatesShown on screen
- D3-C279ConfirmedWhat are quality updatesShown on screen
- D3-C301n/aWhat are quality updatesThe author's interpretation
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- n/a
- Nothing to verify: a quotation, framing, opinion or analysis.