Guardrails · Branch G.A, Link and visibility manipulation
G-03 Cloaking and sneaky redirects are prohibited
Search engines and users must not be shown different content or destinations for the purpose of manipulation.
- Scope
- All public content
- Priority
- Gate. A FAIL stops publish or launch.
- Quality bucket
- Not scored: hard gate only
- Legacy coverage
- SEO-55
Why it matters
If a crawler sees one page and a visitor lands on another, users are misled and search results stop reflecting reality. Google's spam policies treat cloaking and sneaky redirects as manipulation. Hacked redirects can create the same problem without the site owner knowing.
How to implement
- Fetch key URLs as Googlebot and as a normal user, then compare the responses.
- Remove any rule that serves crawlers different content or a different destination.
- Restrict geo and device redirects to cases with a genuine UX need.
- Set up monitoring that alerts you to hacked or unexpected redirects.
Checklist
- Compare the response served to Googlebot with the response served to users.
- Limit geo and device redirects to genuine UX needs.
- Monitor for hacked redirects.
How to audit
- Compare the Googlebot response with the user response for the same URL.
- Review geo and device redirect rules and confirm each has a genuine UX reason.
- Check that redirect monitoring is in place for hacked redirects.
How UltimateSEO checks this automatically
This control needs human evidence: a comparison of what users and crawlers receive, and the business reason for any user-agent or geo-based differences in content or redirects.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
- [G4] Google spam policies
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.1, revised 2026-10-07. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.