Page size and multiple layouts

does google care if you cloak?

[watt]

In order to reduce the page sizes that I have on my site. I'm thinking about serving two versions of all pages. Each version would have identical content on the pages, just one would be setup for displaying to text only browsers and bots and the other would be served to graphical browsers such as IE,NS,Opera. Will google penalize for this type of a setup? Has any one else done this will success? I feel that this would accommodate both my client for what they want for a look and feel and also the bots at the same time.

If I were to do this would you give google the no-cache tag so no one else sees this, or just google cache the pages?

Thanks in advance

[jackofalltrades]

I dont think you could be penalised for having a text only version - many sites do it - its more of an accessibility consideration than a spammy technique, IMHO.

JOAT

[WebGuerrilla]

There is certainly nothing wrong with developing a page that is specifically designed for those who use text only browsers. However, I'm not sure what you mean by "reducing the page sizes."

When Google visits your site, it doesn't request any image files, so you aren't transfering needless bandwidth. Now if your code contains a bunch of scripting or nested tables, then you will reduce bandwidth and speed up crawling by developing a text only version.

As far as the noarchive goes, I wouldn't use it unless you atre doing something you don't want a competitor to see.

[watt]

You are correct, I have a bunch of nested tables and I'm hoping to reduce the size of the pages be getting rid of that in the text only version.

Thanks guys.

[Nick_W]

Alternatively you could write all your html docs to a strict dtd like xhtml 1.1 and use css for all your presentation.

Cut's down on filesize to a huge degree and if you take just a little extra care it will be extremely accessible. Here's a nice thread to get you started:

From HTML to XHTML/CSS [webmasterworld.com]

Nick