Google: Directing Users & GoogleBot To Fasters Servers Is Not Cloaking

Aug 16, 2017 - 7:47 am 2 by

Server Speed Google

A webmaster asked John Mueller of Google if it is cloaking or against Google's guidelines to direct GoogleBot to the fastest server available to render the content on the web site. John said on Twitter that there is nothing wrong with sending users (or I guess GoogleBot) to the fastest possible server available at the time. John said "serving users from a local, fast server is a common setup, that's fine."

Cloaking is really about serving different content to users that you would to GoogleBot. It isn't about how fast you serve it. But you really should be careful about doing things different specifically for GoogleBot than your normal users. It can lead to unintentional issues.

Here are the tweets:

It is just really hard to debug what GoogleBot sees versus users when you play games like that.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 21, 2025

Apr 21, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google

Google Drops Event Rich Results Carousel On Desktop Search: Bug?

Apr 21, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

Google Live Demo Of Android AR Glasses

Apr 21, 2025 - 7:41 am
Search News

IAB/PWC: U.S Search Ad Revenue Grew 15.9% With $102.9 Billion In 2024

Apr 21, 2025 - 7:31 am
Bing SEO

Bing Webmaster Tools Working To Streamline Email Notifications

Apr 21, 2025 - 7:21 am
Bing Search

Microsoft Launches Copilot Merchant Program

Apr 21, 2025 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Google: We Count The Same URL In Different Sitemaps Separately