Cloaking – When have you gone too far?
There are some interesting conversations going on in a few of the boards about Cloaking. Yes if you read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you will clearly see if you show Google different data than what a user see’s this is a clear violation.
I personally believe that you need to read between the lines on this. If the content is the same and you want to provide an excellent experience based upon what type of users is hitting your page. I would use browser based detection. For example, if you have a fancy flash based version of your site and a low bandwidth version of your site this is a simple way to provide a better service.
Correct me if I am wrong but if we took this further and broke the users based on bandwidth, browser capability and accessibility you could potentially solve many issues. For example, if a user came to the site with a lower amount of bandwidth you could potentially show smaller images and possibly less results on a given page to make the experience bearable. This could be taken into account when providing complex advertising which may increase load-time significantly. Thus from a cost point of view, if you are spidered lets say a million times a day by Googlebot, can you afford the processing time taken to generate ads to user who will never click on them?
The big question is, how do you present content to search engines when you charge for subscriptions? I typically would recommend something that goes like this:
1). Show a snippet of the data to the search engine and user. Yes, having less content will hinder your rankings, but you will be safe.
2). This may be considered risky, but you could detect either if it’s a search engine or not and provide all of the content to the search engine and if a user clicks on the listing show the content to the user as well. Now you could cookie that user and if they browse let’s say more than 15 articles change the view back to a preview, pay to see more. This is very grey lined, but to me it’s still providing the same data while allowing you to charge for a subscription. If you are worried about the 15 pages, just add advertising to the free pages allowing you to monetize that traffic. It would be great to hear from the Search Quality Teams to see if they agree. I will try and ask the next time I see them.
I personally believe that you need to read between the lines on this. If the content is the same and you want to provide an excellent experience based upon what type of users is hitting your page. I would use browser based detection. For example, if you have a fancy flash based version of your site and a low bandwidth version of your site this is a simple way to provide a better service.
Correct me if I am wrong but if we took this further and broke the users based on bandwidth, browser capability and accessibility you could potentially solve many issues. For example, if a user came to the site with a lower amount of bandwidth you could potentially show smaller images and possibly less results on a given page to make the experience bearable. This could be taken into account when providing complex advertising which may increase load-time significantly. Thus from a cost point of view, if you are spidered lets say a million times a day by Googlebot, can you afford the processing time taken to generate ads to user who will never click on them?
The big question is, how do you present content to search engines when you charge for subscriptions? I typically would recommend something that goes like this:
1). Show a snippet of the data to the search engine and user. Yes, having less content will hinder your rankings, but you will be safe.
2). This may be considered risky, but you could detect either if it’s a search engine or not and provide all of the content to the search engine and if a user clicks on the listing show the content to the user as well. Now you could cookie that user and if they browse let’s say more than 15 articles change the view back to a preview, pay to see more. This is very grey lined, but to me it’s still providing the same data while allowing you to charge for a subscription. If you are worried about the 15 pages, just add advertising to the free pages allowing you to monetize that traffic. It would be great to hear from the Search Quality Teams to see if they agree. I will try and ask the next time I see them.
by Aaron Shear
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