: What is Google's tolerance about cloaking with unwanted crawlers (fraudsters, scammers, etc)? We have a classified ad website. Some fraudsters, scammers and kids crawl the content. Some can be:

@Heady270

Here is Google's document about cloaking. It defines cloaking as "the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines."

That page also has a Matt Cutts video. In the video at 0:28, Matt defines cloaking as "showing different content to users than Googlebot."

Google only cares what you show to real users and what you show to their search engine crawler. You can show different content to other user agents and Google doesn't care. You can also show different content to users that don't come from search engines and Google doesn't care. As long as the content that Googlebot sees is what users from Google will see, you won't get a penalty.

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@Pope3001725

Google only cares that they see the same thing your users see. If you're only serving up different content to these bad crawlers, and your users are getting your normal content and Google is getting that same content, you're ok.

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