How Quora Escapes Google Penalty with Cloaking
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. And Google strongly disapproves it. But Quora, still manages to get away with it. How?
How Quora cloaks content
So, here’s how it is. If you’re on Quora, sign off. search for “Google+: Was Google Me a fake rumor“, the first result should be from Quora leading to this URL (External Link).
You would see on the page that most part of the answer is blurred out.
However, for logged in users, the full answer is shown. So, Google hides the content from anonymous readers. Cloaking? Kinda.
So, how does Quora get away with it?
According to a Quora Admin, Dan Leveille, they use the Google ON/Off codes.
Using Google On, Google Off codes, webmasters can “hide” certain parts of the content from webpages.
Official Documentation on Google On/Off Codes.
Google suggests using the On Off code to control
- The indexing of a word or portion of a Web page
- The indexing of anchor text
- The use of text to create a snippet in search results
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