Dynamic Site

Bad For Search?

[SClaw]

Before I start, let me apologise if I’ve put this in the wrong place. I don’t technically think this is cloaking but on a pure definition basis it might be considered as such.

So on to my question…

I’m intending to redesign an existing site to be completely dynamic, serving different content from the database based upon the referrer (for example, my Adwords visitors will see different text, links and images than a visitor from a partner site will see). For the most part this content wont be wildly different from one version to another but there will be subtle sales changes designed purely to drive the right traffic to the right parts of the site and keep the wrong traffic away from other areas (because a sale of green widgets to by Adwords customer is a waste of money, while that same green widget can make a good profit when coming from a partner).

I have to wonder though; will this hurt my search ranks?

[caveman]

Depends entirely upon how you do it.

If you're using IP delivery and the pages are very similar between versions, and if you start showing the SE bots the broadest versions, that would seem to me personally to be a reasonable use of IP delivery.

Problem is, you never know what the SE's consider reasonable or not. If a competitor turns you in, and in a hand check, a SE employee decides to ban you, while I would consider that unfair, I'm not sure I'd be entirely surprised that it happened. It's a very, very gray area.

Plus without knowing the details of your site, it is possible that a SE might look at it and feel that you could break up the pages, possibly in conjunction with some robots.txt exclusions, and achieve your goals in a way that doesn't involve cloaking.