Does Performing Hreflang Markup Cloaking Attract Google Penalty?

Posted On : May 29th, 2020   By : Dillip K Mohanty   To : Technical SEO

We all know that Google considers cloaking as a violation of its webmaster’s guidelines as this practice presents different content or URLs to search engines and users.

But, have you ever thought about a situation where the hreflang markup will only be served to search engine user agents but not to human visitors? Would this be considered as cloaking by Google?

Let’s know about it from Google itself.

Recently, on Reddit, a redditor asked this question.

Google’s John Mueller on its reply said that surely it is cloaking and also added, I think what you’re asking is more like “will I get a webspam penalty if I do this?” to which the answer is no.

But even after saying this, he still highly discouraged webmasters to use this technique.

Here is the question asked in Reddit.

My client is only serving hreflang mark-up to search engine user agents, not human visitors. Would this be considered cloaking? from r/TechSEO

And this is the anser by John Mueller.