Showing different content to Googlebot

[t'mack]

Hi guys & girls,

I wanted your opinion on the practice of showing different content to Googlebot than you would to the end user. I've noticed a lot of this, specifically the template of the page changing so (I'm guessing) to give the spider a cleaner view and smaller page size. The main text within the page stays the same, and I've noticed a few of these sites in the Google index.

I run a website with photo galleries, and you have to be a member in order to view them. I want to allow googlebot to view these pages so that it can spider new photographs for it's Image search.

Do you think Google would view this as a bad practice and are there any risks of this? The images themselves can be clicked from Google Image Search and viewed by anyone, the membership scheme only kicks in when you try to view them on our site, but I have good rankings within the engine and I don't want this to be a hinderance.

Cheers,

Al

[stymiee]

This may be seen as cloaking and you may get banned if you do it. Serving different content to the search engines is a big no-no.

Now, having said that, I've heard of websites doing what you are proposing in the past with success. But I cannot tell you how they fared so be careful using this tactic.

[incrediblehelp]

I agree dont do it.

[t'mack]

Cheers guys,

I was *this* close to actually making the change, so thanks for your advice.