Hidden footer info: is it for cloaking?

[jediviper]

I was researching a very big online casino group, which has many brands. Not affiliate sites.
All of them legit, very well known names in the market. And I have noticed something weird happening with a specific part of the text, so I wonder if anyone knows the reason for that.

While checking what renders for Google and what not, I have noticed that part of the legal text in the footer that refers to the casino licence is not to be found in what Google discovers if you check the Homepage via the mobile friendly test. There are 2-3 phrases totally missing.

On the other hand, if I use the Chrome extension "View rendered source", I can find normally this text under the Rendered column.

So my questions are:
1) Which source to believe? I guess the Mobile friendly test, which belongs to Google, but I thought that also the other tool that can show the rendered result is accurate. Any idea why they show different things?
2) If they are truly hiding this text from Google, why do u think that this is happening? Can it be so that they avoid the Affiliate filter, where Google associates many different sites -if they share common elements- and ranks only some of them? Maybe they think that having Google seeing the same casino licence under all of their brands will cause some of them not to rank so well?

[JorgeV]

Hello,

This can be to avoid being found, when someone type their license number.

[jediviper]

I see.
So noone thinks that this Affiliate filter can be the reason of such behavior?

[ravinder3790]

Well, this seems to be against the Google guidelines that can harm in future.

[jediviper]

There is definitely nothing happening against these websites, which I have checked through Ahrefs and they seem to have never been affected by any drop of rankings.
And why it is considered to be bad that someone hides a small part of text of his website from Google?

[NickMNS]

This is not considered cloaking. It is technique used to avoid legal boiler plate text to appear in Google search. There is likely a legal obligation to display the text on every page, but this would create duplicate content issue for Google, so in order to avoid this, the text is hidden from Googlebot. I'm not sure that this a "best practice" but it is tolerated. Typically the type of cloaking that will get you in trouble with Google refers to showing Googlebot some "legitimate" and often scraped content, and then showing users some more questionable, often adult content, spam.

And why it is considered to be bad that someone hides a small part of text of his website from Google?

It isn't necessarily bad. If you offer customization, you may show Googlebot one thing (non-customized content), a group of user another thing (customized to group 1), and yet another group of user a different thing (customized to group 2). Cloaking becomes an issue when you deliberately hide content from Googlebot in order to deceive Google, or to misrepresent the actual content of the page. Example if you have adult content on a page but want to avoid "safe search" filters, so you hide that content from Google.

[lucy24]

this would create duplicate content issue for Google

Would it really, or was this only something to worry about in 2009 when G was less clever than it is now?

[NickMNS]

Would it really, or was this only something to worry about in 2009

Very likely.

[jediviper]

So guys what is your suggestion for a big group of companies that share the same licence details and contact support emails+telephone numbers among different countries?
If this can be considered as duplicate content, should we consider use this "hiding" technique, in case that Google is demoting some of our websites for this reason?