flatfile - 11:38 am on Jan 13, 2013 (gmt 0)

very tricky and indeed this had always been in my mind as well. When we disable ads (this can infact be extended to any content) for all bots and not just googlebot, will it be considered as cloaking?

I remember one of Matt Cutts' videos. He mentioned something along the lines of: "If somewhere in your code you detect Googlebot, and then serve different content. Then that's cloaking."

Showing different content for all bots is something that can be done via javascript or Ajax. Matt mentioned that it's a bit of a grey area. You will be okay if you're not doing something extreme e.g on a page about cars: If you were to hide content using javascript and load pron via ajax calls.