• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog , Thursday, June 5, 2008 2 PM

Google offers up definitions for four common Web serving techniques, explaining the differences between white hat--geolocation and IP delivery--and black hat options like cloaking.

To be clear, cloaking violates Google's Webmaster guidelines, and if a site is caught doing it--it will be penalized by a drop in (or exclusion from) rankings. Cloaking is a way of serving the giant's crawler different content than the average user (be it something harmless like an ad, or malicious like malware). "If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you're in a high-risk category," says Maile Ohye.

Geolocation and IP delivery are quite similar. Geolocation is a way to serve targeted content to users based on where they're coming from (based on cookies or other login info), while IP delivery chooses the content based on the location of their IP address. In both cases, you can avoid being penalized by serving Google's crawler the same content you would as a typical user from a similar location or IP range. But, "don't treat Googlebot as if it came from its own separate country-that's cloaking," Ohye says.

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