Is Hiding Ads from Google Considered as Cloaking?

Cloaking:

Cloaking is a practice in Search Engine Optimization where in different content and URL’s are presented to humans and search engine bots. The content or URL’s which are viewed by users will be completely different compared to what search engines read. This is considered as one of the spam techniques because it violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines where in it provides users of Google with completely different results than what they expect.

Examples of Cloaking:

Allocating a HTML page with text to Search Engines, but the same page is shown to users with images and flash.

Adding text or keywords into a page if and only if User-agent requesting page is a search engine and is not a human visitor.

Cloaking Ads:

If you want to hide ads from Google it is considered as cloaking ads similar to the situation where in content and URL’s are hidden as in cloaking. And it is considered as violating terms and policies of Google.

In this case, it is considered as webmasters just want to show ads only to the users who sign-up and logged in. Users who do not login will not be able to see ads, even if they are registered or not. Only the one who is logged in will be able to see ads. So, even Google bot will not be able to see ads as it won’t be able to login. It can be able to see what a non-logged in person will see and will not see what a logged-in member views. But this will not be considered as cloaking ads as Google bot and non-logged in member sees same thing. There will be absolutely no issues because google bot will not login and it does not even know that logged in users are being served different content.

 If you show Google bot different and non-logged in user’s different matter then it can be considered as cloaking and it in fact revolves around your purpose for representation of different content. If you are showing Google bot one thing in order to rank for particular keyword phrase and if you serve something totally different then this will result in being penalized. 

So hiding ads from Google and not logged in members is not considered as cloaking because both not logged in users and Google bot will be seeing the same content, only logged in members will be seeing something different.