Is cloaking for Google ever acceptable?

[seoskunk]

Ok consider this case scenerio. Site has lots of dynamic filter pages in categories, despite adding the parameters with "No urls" in webmastertools account and "NOINDEX" the pages Google keeps on crawling. The server is a bit ropey so often crashes when google tries to crawl these parameters aggressively. I didn't want to add rel="nofollow" as that can still diminish pagerank. So I decided to remove all the parameters urls from Google's eyes by not displaying these links to googlebot.

Is this acceptable behaviour, it is cloaking which google don't like but is removing content by cloaking OK?

[aakk9999]

It is not cloaking, I do it all the time.

In fact, Google suggests this themselves for (for example) facetet navigation or for internal search pages.

Best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en [support.google.com]

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

[seoskunk]

Thanks aakk9999 its good to know I am not the only one doing this.