Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our
webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you're in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.
Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: How Google defines IP delivery, geolocation, and cloaking
Now my question is:
There are some ways you can hide content parts from search engines. For example:
- One option is using IFRAMES. You can prevent the target of the <iframe> tag from being indexed by using a robots meta tag set to "noindex" or disallow the page in with the robots.txt file.
- Another option would be doing that with Ajax like
Simple AJAX call to Hide a Form from bots and Search Engines — JavaScript Junkie
- Another option would be You can create a folder called i.e
forms and then create a file called i.e
form.php and in this file you can add the form content.
Then you add in the site template an PHP include to draw in the content of the form.php file.
Then you forbid the bots in your .htaccess to access form.php with a 403. In addition you can add a rule in the robots.txt to disallow the folder
forms.
- Another option is a php script called spider.php we have created and that disallows bots to access content parts where they look for example like this:
PHP Code:
<?php
if (!spider_detection('spider'))
{
echo('<p><img src="http://www.seoworkers.com/images/spam.png" alt="Spam?"></p><p><font color="blue"><strong>"This page was created as Activeco advised me. The page image and this sentence here (with the blue font color) should not be visible to search engines."</strong></font></p>');
}
?>
Are any of the above options violating Google guidelines about cloaking? If yes, which and why?
For the last option you can have a look at a test page I just setup for testing:
Hidding content from search engines
Thanks for your contribution.
John