Is this cloaking or not?

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Is this cloaking or not?

Moving site navigation links based on user agent

BarryStCyr

8:17 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

I know I should ask G itself if this is cloaking, but all things considered I rather fly a little more under the radar.

Is is cloaking if you deliver the same page of information, but in a different order, like moving the site navigation from the left border to the bottom, when Googlebot comes to visit?

That is people would see a page with site navigation on the left, but known bots would see the site navigation after the main body of the page.

All information and presentation would otherwise be unchanged.

The reason for this is that many of my pages indexed by Google have the site navigation links in the description.

Thanks
Barry.

Hobbs

8:29 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

sounds legit to me, as long as all the information is there.

jomaxx

8:35 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

It's a good practice, and can be used to improve your AdSense targeting as well. But you can do it without the need for cloaking, which is a dangerous area to get into. CSS is the most common way.

BarryStCyr

8:37 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

I tried doing it with CSS and wound up with my absoulutely positioned <div> block floating over the header on Google Cache. It looked very unprofessional. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I thought this might be better.

Thanks

Erku

8:44 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

My question is partially similar to this topic. For the pages that are for printing purpose, do you put non-follow meta tag?

Or is it ok to leave it for "extra" traffic?

It is the same page, but only with Content and Adsense, nothing else.

hyperkik

9:22 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

Try putting the content in another div, let's call it "main",
#main {
position: relative;
top:0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
margin: 0;
}

Then when you use absolute positioning for the div with AdSense inside "main", it should position itself inside of "main", which should resolve your problem with the Google cache.

david_uk

9:34 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

I don't know why you would need to move the order around for Googlebot. I'm sure it can cope :)

If you adopt a CSS layout then the site can look the same, and have the text before the menu in the code permanently. I learned earlier this week (on this forum) that what you want to do is called Source Ordered Content (SOC), and is apparently a common technique. So I've changed my old tables for a CSS layout that orders the content as you want to, and looks the same as my old layout did. Seems to load faster, and works on all the browser / resolutions combinations I can make here.

topr8

10:37 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

Is is cloaking if you deliver the same page of information, but in a different order ....... when Googlebot comes to visit?

yes

new question: is this an issue?

this is a totally different question and opens a can of worms

fredw

10:50 pm on Aug 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

By the way, if you don't want to tackle this with CSS, you can also accomplish it with tables. My sites have a left-nav and a main body to the right of it, using a cute table arrangement I have my body content first in the code of the page, and then it is followed by the left-nav content. Sticky me if you'd like more info on the simple way to do this with tables.