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:
Serving users from a local, fast server is a common setup, that's fine.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) August 16, 2017
It is just really hard to debug what GoogleBot sees versus users when you play games like that.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
