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In my newly developed ecommerce site, where I sell tires, I have a tire-finder page. This is essentially the page where you find your product and go to the specific product page. I wanted it all to be real nice and modern with javascript form and ajax calls, but I also wanted it to be SEO friendly. So if you enter the page with JS turned of (or as a Googlebot) you will see this:

googlebot view
(source: daekskifte.dk)

This lists all tiretypes (summertires, wintertires, allyear tires etc.) on the left side and all products according to the selected type on the right side linking to the specific product page.

And a normal user with JS turned on, would initally see the same, but it would quickly be replaced by this, when the DOM is ready:

web 2.0 view

After the form is loaded, the products are loaded with ajax and are updated each time you change something in the forms.

I showed it to my friend, who claims it was "bad" cloaking. He claims this was considered violating Googles guidelines for cloaking, because i showed different content to the user and google. In my opinion, it's the same content displayed in two different ways, but I really can't afford to take the chance on a hunch, and i'm very new to SEO, so basicly I really don't know.

So i went online when I stumbled upon this article claiming there is both white cloaking (good) and black cloaking (bad). Unfortunately I still don't feel very convinced on whether it's good or bad, so...

So my main question is:

  • Is this technique considered bad cloaking or good cloaking?

Additional questions:

  • I have considered displaying my top 20 overall products instead of displaying all tires filtered by tiretype in the "Google"-view. Is this a better option for optimizing my popular products?
  • I have also considered just having all products in a long list, opinions about this?
Glorfindel
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Esben
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  • I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me the difference between what would be illegal or legal in this case would likely be dependent on your intent. If you're not trying to deceive your users, it is probably not illegal. – corsiKa Dec 22 '11 at 23:31
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    Can you edit your post to distill it down to something that's more of a question? There's a lot of noise and clutter about your friend "rioting" and "throwing with screens'n'stuff" and "catastrophic failure" and "glimmering lights". It seems you could ask your actual question with less drama and improve your chances of getting an answer. – Ken White Dec 22 '11 at 23:33
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    You're not doing based on user agent, you're doing it based on user agent capabilities. I find it unlikely that presenting useful content for an agent with JS turned off, unavailable, or partially-implemented, would be considered remotely "black hat". – Dave Newton Dec 22 '11 at 23:35
  • @glowcoder He doesn't mean "illegal" in the legal sense. He means prohibited. This usage would never be "illegal". The law has no place here, his question is just about whether Google will see this as a violation for cloaking content. – Layke Dec 22 '11 at 23:36
  • glowcoder, this is made ofcourse with good intent, but it's hard to rely on just that. Ken White, yeah yeah - sry 'bout that – Esben Dec 22 '11 at 23:37
  • Your current technique appears to be SEO bait. Replacing the majority of your DOM on load is frowned upon. Javascript should enhance interactivity -- not replace your entire's page contents by completely rewriting the presentation layer. – Kenaniah Dec 22 '11 at 23:39
  • Thanks for all the inputs. Kenaniah, this is also my friends argument, however the content is not changed, only the way it's displayed? But it see your point! – Esben Dec 22 '11 at 23:43

2 Answers2

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This is fine. You're showing the same content, one is just a better user experience then the other. This is a perfect example of progressive enhancement.

Cloaking is when you only show content to search engines specifically for the purpose of manipulating the search engine rankings. So if you start showing content to Google only, especially if you're filtering content based on user--agent or IP address, then you're cloaking and it's black hat SEO.

John Conde
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  • Then what if i switched to the "top 20 overall products"? Would it then be considered bait, since i only show Google, what i want it to focus? – Esben Dec 22 '11 at 23:46
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As John Conde said this is not cloaking. If loading content after the DOM were considered cloaking then we couldn't use much of javascript or ajax scripts. What you should do, is trying to show always the same "content" to the js and the non-js users.

andreas mauer
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