Rendering
Cloaking
Serving materially different content to crawlers vs users — explicitly forbidden by Google.
Definition
Cloaking detects user-agent and serves different content based on whether the visitor is a crawler. Google guidelines forbid it; sites that cloak risk manual penalties. Compliant prerendering serves the same semantic content as a static snapshot for performance reasons, which is allowed.
See also
More in Rendering
Prerendering
Generating static HTML snapshots of JavaScript-rendered routes for crawlers and (sometimes) users.
Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
Generating HTML on the server for every request, then sending it to the browser.
Static Site Generation (SSG)
Building every page as static HTML at build time and serving from a CDN.
Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)
A hybrid where pages are static-served from cache but regenerated on demand or on a TTL.
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