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I'm building my own Dynamic Rendering (DR) solution, and I don't really see how it can work because of cloaking.

So what Google says about DR: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/javascript/dynamic-rendering

Dynamic rendering is not cloaking. Using dynamic rendering to serve completely different content to users and crawlers can be considered cloaking. For example, a website that serves a page about cats to users and a page about dogs to crawlers can be considered cloaking.

The problem is, my website is JS-based, and the content is generated on client side. Every minute the content can be different, since I'm working with 40 different sources, so every minute about 400 new articles are inserted. So just as Google said: dynamic rendering may serve completely different content.

So let's say the Google bot visits the site, the category Animals, and it finds an article about cats. 1 minute later it may find the same Animals category with an article about dogs. And from the linked Google-article that's considered cloaking. However in reality both of them belong to the same category, on a website where the content is dynamically added, and refreshed every minute.

So could you please tell me, how can it be solved? Or how does Google check if a bot receives completely different content? Because for that it needs 2 parallel checks: 1 with a normal user, and 1 with crawling bot. At the same time. Only in this case it's possible to check whether the content of the 2 variants are different. But that would be a waste of resources.

I'm totally confused, how to go on. I can't understand how it's working, what is checked, how it's checked, what's considered cloaking, and how to solve it.

I'm serving the same kind of content for the bots and for the normal users. It's not possible to server the same content, since it's changing minute to minute, visit to visit.

Please help me. Thank you.

lpasztor
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  • You should probably set those category pages to `noindex, follow` then. I can't see any good reason, why Google should index it and send me there in the first place, if I searched for something related to "cats", and now the current content I will see on that page is articles about dogs. That offers me zero benefit in this situation, and would indeed be massively misleading. – CBroe May 10 '22 at 07:04
  • @CBroe Imagine this website just like Facebook. You scroll, and the JS loads new content regarding the selected category. If you search for cats, and find my page (for category Animals), it loads, and you see the first few results for dogs, all you have to do is scroll down. It's not category Cats, but category Animals, so dogs are also there. I can't set different categories for all type of animals (cats, dogs etc.). Of course I don't want to set noindex, since I want these pages to be present on Google. I just would like to know, **what is considered cloaking**. – lpasztor May 10 '22 at 08:36
  • From my perspective as a user, there is not much sense in finding a page as a search result, that doesn't show the exact content the search engine indexed. I do not _want_ to have to scroll down, hoping that your page might eventually load the correct piece of content that I am expecting. And since you gave Facebook as an example - I doubt that any search engine links back to a dynamic feed on Facebook. If they link to something, that is usually individual posts. – CBroe May 10 '22 at 08:42
  • @CBroe I got your point, and you are completely right. That's why I made all the linked post to be linked through my redirect domain. So if you search for cats, you will find my site, with a redirected link to the original post. But back to my site: it's enough for me if Google indexes my page through the meta description - where I only mention animal keyword for the animal categories. (As you would expect.) So I really just want to understand this cloaking. How can I avoid it with such a Facebook-style scrolling content page, where the content gets updated minute to minute. – lpasztor May 10 '22 at 09:02

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