index.php cloaking..

[BetaChat]

Lets say I wanted to create a page that was "user created" meaning that my index.php page had variables, and when the links were clicked on, different content was displayed. So if I had a link on the index.php page that was "stuff", I would display stuff on the page under the url of "index.php?goto=stuff" and "morestuff" would be another page at "index.php?goto=morestuff". Now would it be a problem if I were to advertise in Google AdWords with my header being "Stuff" then my normal description, then another page being "More Stuff"? Is that cloaking?

[bhartzer]

I would call that "personalization" rather than cloaking. What would the search engine see?

[BetaChat]

If the url was "index.php". The main intro page. If the url was "index.php?goto=anotherpage" then "anotherpage" would be shown. The thing I'm really getting at is to use just one page instead of "anotherpage.php" and so on. There is a reason for it.

[DaveAtIFG]

It's cloaking if users and spiders get different content. [webmasterworld.com...]

It's almost certain to be considered cloaking by SEs if what's in their cache doesn't match what's available at the URL they indexed.

[yummycarp]

I think this question is still unanswered and I have the same question. Is it bad to have the whole website use index.php/var1/var2

Does the ranking suffer if the same script is used even though it sends back unique pages?

Does it matter if .php is in the middle of the url or at the end, ie. will a search engine prefer domain.com/var1/var2/page.php over domain.com/index.php/var1/var2 (by prefer I mean 2 things, 1. any indexing problems? and 2. any ranking drawbacks?) Thanks.

[BetaChat]

I'm under the impression that if the output of my "index.php?goto=there" is one thing on my browser, and something different on the cached index of the search engine. I think.

[volatilegx]

It is not cloaking. Cloaking is when you show different content based on the identity of the client (viewer). Having the URL specify different content by using different parameters is definitely not cloaking.

However, you may have problems getting organic listings in Google using such a system. Google will only recognize so many parameters.

You might want to consider using Mod_Rewrite to translate regular URLs into the parameters... so that you could make links like this:

[yourdomain.com...]

rewrite into this:

[yourdomain.com...]