Google’s John Mueller in a long Google Hangout yesterday said that it is not problematic to cloak your XML sitemap file to search engines. The reason is, the XML Sitemap files are meant to only be seen by search engines and not users, so cloaking them differently for users makes no sense. You can change them up for GoogleBot versus Yahoo, Bing, etc – there is no issue with that.

John said this at the 19:30 mark into the video.

The question was:

John’s answer:

Here is the video embed:

So if you are dying to do some cloaking, have fun with it with your XML Sitemaps. 🙂 Oh, just be careful because if you show yourself a different XML file, it might be hard to debug what GoogleBot sees.

Forum discussion at Google+.