Uncloaking Content for Low-End Browsers

Reversed Content Delivery?

[Amrito]

Our pages are currently navigated via a JavaScript menu. The same menu appears on every page in the site.

In order to allow low-end browsers, which cannot see these pages because they cannot read this menu, access to the same content pages, with the same urls, we want to create an alternative, text-based menu system.

We are considering a plan to identify all the top-end browsers, which can support our regular menu, and render from the server side the JavaScript menu to them. And render from the server side a plain, text menu for all other visitors.

Is this a problem for search engines, spiders, bots etc., which will have rendered to them, by default, the same plain, text menu?

Would this be regarded as deceptive, spamming, or whatever? Or is this just old fashioned, sensible content delivery in the best interests of all concerned?

We would be grateful for any advice about this.

[Lord Majestic]

Why not just provide unique link to "text" or "light-weight" version of each page with subsequent URLs on these pages pointing to the type of page that is currently displayed?

This way its not cloaking and will provide better version of content for bots.

[Amrito]

Thank you for taking the time to reply Lord Majestic.

Would you please explain where these "light-weight" pages would be linked from?

And how would users (low-end and spiders) get to them if they cant follow the links from the current Javascript menu in the first place?

Also, if the spiders saw the light-weight pages and indexed them, how would our other visitors (who have high-end browsers) be referred to the user-friendly high-end version of the page?

We'd prefer to have only one url per page of content. (The site is quite large and is in 13 languages).

And keeping the spiders out of what would be duplicate content could be time-consuming.

And are you saying that our original suggestion would be considered cloaking by SE's?

[volatilegx]

You should just nest the HTML menu in <noscript></noscript> tags. Browsers that don't understand JS will display it and browsers that do won't.

[drbrain]

You could go with a hybrid JS/CSS menu [devedge.netscape.com] that allows a nice nested list views for non-CSS/JS capable browsers, and degrades beautifully for text-mode users.

[Lord Majestic]

Would you please explain where these "light-weight" pages would be linked from?

Have a well placed link on "heavy weight" pages.

And are you saying that our original suggestion would be considered cloaking by SE's?

It can be, I'd imagine Google will do a stealth health check by spidering page using normal IE6 useragent and then doing comparison to what was expected - I think they are or definately should be smarter in not comparing byte for byte.

You should just nest the HTML menu in <noscript></noscript> tags.

You can, but this would increase page size, which would be particularly painful for devices with narrow bandwidth (smartphones etc).

I hope some experts on the matter will comment on which approach is definitively better, or perhaps its a grey area.