forum different skin for google: any effect on adsense revenues?

[sallam]

Greetings

In my forum, I'm using a text based, bare light skin for google bot to view my forum with, which also has minimum links, friendly URLs, and no images and no or few adsense ads.

My concern is, could that have any negative effect on my adsense revenues?

In other words, must google see my forum in exactly the same skin that my visitors see it with, with same adsense ads and all?

And does the same google bots serve both search engine indexing and adsense?

I'm asking because I'm having a decrease in revenues and don't know whether the skin issue is to blame here..

[jatar_k]

what you're doing is essentially cloaking, which Google does frown upon. I don't know if that is a cause if an AdSense drop, no clue, though it could be part of a ranking change, which could reduce/change traffic etc.

Yes, the different google bots share jobs

[sallam]

jatar_k
Thanks so much for alerting me. I didn't know that what I was doing was wrong. I didn't even know what cloaking is. I just thought I make a lite skin with less links to make it easier on google, no software envolved. Thank God I switched back a while ago. Your advise confirmed that I made the right decission.

Searching the word 'cloaking' I found a statement made by GoogleGuy

I would be really careful about cloaking. google considers it spam and can remove sites for doing it. You run the risk of getting zero traffic from google and its partners if you cloak.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum24/366.htm
I'll never use that skin again.
Thanks so much for the advise.

[jatar_k]

if it is the default skin for anyone who is not logged in then that's fine

cloaking would serving one thing to users and another thing to search engines

[swa66]

While cloaking in general is bad, forums are different than general content too.

Cloaking for search engines (not just google, all of them) can be good to needed on forums in order to avoid having dozens of duplicate content pages indexed.

The reason is that most forum software has dozens of URLs that will show essentially the same content over and over. Just think of all the ways you can get to a post that shows up in the URL.

Getting the simpler view to the search engine can help in giving them less pages to index and that should be a good thing, even for them.

Some forum software (such as phpBB3) recognize the search engine bots and give them a different view by default. Developers out there see it as helping the search engine find the post, without confusing them with pagination of the results, different number of posts on each page, etc.

Take care with the adsense bot: they might (should) be much more sensitive if that one gets different content somehow.

[sallam]

swa66,
Thanks for your great ideas. I find them in line with some useful tips I've seen elsewhere

And thanks for alerting me about adsense sensitivity to viewing content different than what visitors view. Very important reminder indeed. And I was wondering why my earnings dropped 50% for several months now.

One can apply both worlds: take your advice and eliminate duplicate forum links, but in the same skin that guests view, not in a separate skin just for SEs. I've started to apply that approach.

btw, is it then best if we prevent SEs from indexing lofi version links too? IPB software, like vb and many others, generate a lofi/lite version of all forums and topics by default. Does that also count as cloaking? is it better to block such pages using robot.txt?

[edited by: jatar_k at 2:18 pm (utc) on April 4, 2008]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]