CloakScan Blog

Technical Guides for Cloaking and WordPress Compromise Response

Practical playbooks for freelancers and agencies who need to investigate suspicious indexing, detect cloaking patterns, and recover compromised client sites without guesswork.

Latest

Meet the New CloakScan Studio: A Clearer View of Your Websites

Explore the redesigned CloakScan Studio: clearer site insights, interactive charts, more reliable scheduled scans and the first stage of site baseline insights.

Sep 21, 2026 5 min read

Cloaking Detection

Why a Clean Cloaking Scan Is Not Enough: The Case for Continuous Monitoring

A clean cloaking scan is a useful snapshot, not a permanent guarantee. Learn what a single check can miss, how monitoring closes the blind window, and what continuous protection should actually include.

Aug 27, 2026 9 min read

Incident Response

Wordfence Says Clean. Google Still Shows Spam: Why Plugin Scans Miss Cloaking

A green Wordfence or Sucuri scan does not mean Google stopped indexing spam. Learn why file scanners miss crawler-only cloaking, what usually survives a cleanup, and how to verify the same URL as a visitor and as Googlebot.

Aug 17, 2026 10 min read

Cloaking Detection

User-Agent Cloaking vs IP Cloaking: Why Faking Googlebot Is Not a Real Test

Spoofing a Googlebot User-Agent only tests one gate. IP and ASN cloaking still see a normal office or datacenter. Learn how the two techniques differ, why attackers stack them, and how to audit both signals on the same URL.

Aug 14, 2026 10 min read

Cloaking Detection

CDN and Edge Cloaking: When Cloudflare Rules Show Google One Thing and Users Another

CDN and edge cloaking rewrites HTML or redirects at Cloudflare (or another edge) so Googlebot sees a clean site while targeted visitors get spam. Learn how it works, how to audit edge rules, and how to detect crawler-browser mismatches.

Aug 4, 2026 10 min read

Cloaking Detection

Sneaky Mobile Redirects: How .htaccess Cloaking Hijacks Only Your Mobile Visitors

Sneaky mobile redirects send phone visitors to spam or ad pages while desktop users, Googlebot and manual QA all see a clean site. Learn how the redirect is injected, why Search Console often misses it, and how to detect and remove it.

Jul 8, 2026 10 min read

SEO Integrity

Subdomain SEO Spam: How Forgotten Subdomains Poison Your Main Domain's Rankings

Learn how attackers exploit forgotten subdomains for SEO spam, why your main domain can look clean while Google indexes garbage elsewhere, and how to audit every host under your brand.

Jun 9, 2026 10 min read

SEO Integrity

How to Check if Google Has Indexed Spam Pages on Your Domain

A practical workflow to verify whether Google has indexed pharma, casino, adult, or crypto spam under your domain, validate cloaking, and respond before rankings slide.

May 22, 2026 11 min read

SEO Integrity

How SEO Agencies Can Detect Cloaking Before Rankings Collapse

A practical playbook for SEO agencies to detect cloaking early, prioritize client risk, and prevent ranking loss with repeatable monitoring.

May 6, 2026 9 min read

SEO Integrity

5 Signs Someone Is Using Your Website for Black-Hat SEO (Without You Knowing)

Five concrete warning signals that attackers are exploiting your domain's authority for black-hat SEO — and how to check each one without technical expertise.

May 4, 2026 10 min read

WordPress Security

The Pharma Hack: How Your WordPress Site Is Silently Selling Viagra to Google

How pharmaceutical SEO injection attacks work, why they stay invisible for months using Googlebot-targeted cloaking, how to detect them, and how to clean a compromised WordPress site.

May 2, 2026 11 min read

SEO Integrity

Google Sees One Site, Users See Another: How SEO Cloaking Actually Happens (Without You Knowing)

A technical breakdown of how SEO cloaking works in 2026 — from intentional manipulation to accidental misdirection by plugins, CDNs and caching layers — and how to verify what Google actually sees.

Apr 27, 2026 11 min read

Read the playbook. Then watch the site.

A guide tells you what to look for. CloakScan keeps comparing what Google sees with what visitors see.

Run a free scan

5 manual scans / month · Free account required · No credit card