: Can serving a different header code for crawlers and users be considered cloaking? I have urls that point to pages I don't know yet if exist. Whenever reaching those, I perform a not-so-quick

I have urls that point to pages I don't know yet if exist. Whenever reaching those, I perform a not-so-quick external sources check, and if exists generate the page on the fly. In order to avoid this behavior for search engine crawlers, I'm showing them a 404 header code. When a user comes, I'm first loading a status bar with flush() and then if I didn't find just display an error message with a 200 header code, because the headers are already sent in the flush() status bar. Whenever the page ends up as empty with an error message and a 200 code, it's like a 404 soft error.

Although my reasons are legit, I'm a bit concerned if Google might misinterpret this behavior and consider it cloaking?

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@Kaufman445

Whenever I have seen cloaking detected by Google, the 'punishment' has been for the pages to be deindexed, but your pages would be returning a 404 anyway, so nothing will be indexed, and nor are you trying to trick Google into indexing a page with content not seen by a user. I also would speculate that the situation would likely be viewed as a misconfiguration if it was looked at closely.

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: Can serving a different header code for crawlers and users be considered cloaking? I have urls that point to pages I don't know yet if exist. Whenever reaching those, I perform a not-so-quick

More posts by @Cooney921

: Recommendations for small hosting solution with lots of support I maintain a personal website though have never put much effort in building up the front-end. I really just use it as a testbed

: Does Google Analytics not track data accurately when reporting the same pages to multiple accounts? I am reporting my traffic to 2 different Google Analytics accounts. Using Universal Analytics,

: Reduce likelihood of Mailchimp email campaign going to Spam The company I work for sends a marketing email at least one time per week using Mailchimp's email service. All of our subscribers

: Why doesn't Google remove my noindex and 404 pages? I've added 404 error codes and no-index meta tag to pages quite some time ago. However, when I check in Google Webmaster Tools, looking at

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