SEO spam and cloaking: casino and pharma links only Google can see
Updated 2026-10-16 · 6 min read · by the IsHacked team
Slot gacor, online casino, cheap pills: spam campaigns buy rankings by planting links on thousands of legitimate sites. They hide them so the owner doesn't notice and remove them.
Compare your site with what Googlebot sees
The three forms it takes
- Cloaked pages or content. The site serves spam only when the user agent says Googlebot, or only to Google's IP ranges.
- Hidden links. Links inside elements styled
display:none, positioned off-screen or with a zero font size. Visitors don't see them; crawlers do. - Spam pages and sitemaps. New pages generated for gambling or pharma keywords, listed in a sitemap so they are indexed fast.
Check it yourself
diff <(curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -o 'href="https\?://[^"]*' | sort -u) \
<(curl -s -A 'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)' https://example.com/ | grep -o 'href="https\?://[^"]*' | sort -u)Links that appear only in the Googlebot version are cloaked. Also search Google for site:example.com casino, site:example.com slot and site:example.com viagra.
Some cloaking checks Google's real IP addresses, which no outside test can imitate. Search Console's URL Inspection → Test live URL → View tested page fetches from Google itself and shows the HTML Google receives.
Clean up
- Find the code that decides who gets the spam: search theme and plugin files and the database for user-agent checks (
Googlebot,HTTP_USER_AGENT) next to output of links or pages. - Remove spam pages, links and sitemaps, and every backdoor that let them in (see the cleanup checklist).
- Check Search Console for unknown owners and sitemaps, then request a review if the site was flagged.
Keep watching
SEO spam is profitable, so the same campaigns come back to the same sites. Comparing the Googlebot and browser versions of your homepage and sitemap every day catches a reinfection within a day instead of after the rankings drop.
FAQ
What is cloaking?
Serving different content to search engines than to people. Hacked sites use it to show spam links or pages to Googlebot while visitors and the owner see the normal site.
Will Google penalise my site for hacked spam?
Google can flag the site as hacked in search results and in Search Console, and spam pages dilute rankings. Once the spam is removed and the site is clean, you can request a review in Search Console.