<b>The cloaking penalty nobody meant to trigger</b>

<b>The cloaking penalty nobody meant to trigger</b>

A marketplace ran prerendering for bots and live React for users. Rankings were fine for a year. Then a slow, grinding decline — no spike, just erosion across the whole domain.

We diffed what Googlebot received against what users got. Months earlier, a frontend team shipped a redesign: new layout, new internal links, new H1s. They updated the React app. Nobody updated the prerender service's cache.

Googlebot was being served a snapshot of a site that hadn't existed since the redesign — old links pointing at dead routes, old H1s, missing new sections. Users saw the new site. The gap widened with every sprint.

The danger of split-serving architectures: they decay silently. There's no error. The two versions just drift apart until the bot's reality and the user's reality share nothing.

Fix: tied prerender cache invalidation to the deploy pipeline, max 24-hour TTL, plus a weekly automated diff alert.

Result: stopped the bleed in three weeks, recovered to baseline plus 14% over four months as the dead-link signals cleared.

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