Forum Moderators: open
Anyway, my question:
I am a complete newbie to 'cloaking', so forgive me if this is a obvious question (BTW is there a FAQ for this forum?).
My website is based on a template of a navigation bar on the left side of the page, with the content on the right, and I use a table to achieve this. It looks good for human visitors, but to spiders it is not at all desirable.
What I want to do is simply serve up a page without the table and navigation bar for the spiders, so that it gets straight to the content. However, I've read suggestions here that a search engine may spider your site under its normal UA, and then come back from a different IP with a UA matching a standard web browser, and if the file size of the two results don't match, ban the website.
Is this a serious worry? I realise that most of this area is educated guess work, but any help would be appreciated.
Many thanks in advance,
Robin
Simple on topic, in context cloaking (the good kind)? Nah. They won't even notice it.
>FAQ for this forum?
A good start on one:
[webmasterworld.com...]
>Is this a serious worry?
Not if you don't spam. Even if you remove tables so that stuff moves to the top of the page, try to make it look reasonable so that if viewed from an se workstation, it passes muster. On those where I strip tables, I usually insert a comment <!-- lynx version -->. I think it has saved my bacon a time or two.
There is so much cloaking and agent delivery going on that, se's can't stop it. The whole trick is not to give them an excuse even if they see the page.
