i realize cloaking - throwing up a hyper-seoed page specifically for crawlers, which then redirects to the page normal users see - is bad, and i have never done it. in fact, i get a kick out of reporting black hat morons who do it. but now i have a little dilemma, namely some of my pages are great for humans but not too friendly to the crawlers. the seo thing to do would be to totally modfiy the page and destroy the look and feel of the interface totally, but i don't want to do that. my users love my site, and pages already rank ok (though they could be ranking a lot better). so i am thinking of adding a little paragraph for the benefit of googlebot. The page other users see, and the page googlebot sees, would be IDENTICAL except that googlebot gets a little extra snippet of text. anyone know if this is kosher? i don't want to venture even half a step out of the safe white hat zone as my livelivehood depends on the generosity of mr googsy. if anyone has gone over the ToS with a finetooth comb, i'd appreciate a heads up.
So what you are talking about is altering a page specifically to raise your position in SERP? Do YOU think it's kosher?
i'm not altering it, i'm adding to it, to help google understand my site better. google gets exactly what my users get, with a little extra. google needs extra info because it is a bot. for instance, normal users don't go through the sitemaps, but google does. as for whether i think it's kosher, i don't know, that's why i'm ASKING bonehead. if you haven't read the ToS more than i have you're not much use to me so stay off the thread will ya.
LOL, you are a hoot there. Needing to resort to name calling and such rather then using common sense. ADDING content specifically for a bot to gain better SERP is altering it. If the content you provide to the general public is not enough for the googlebot to understand, maybe you need to add content for the rest of us... here is something else from the same page: It's also pretty much covered here: Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages which says...
But it's not for googlebot's benefit, is it? It's for your benefit. Deliberately presenting different content to search engines will cause a bad karmic reaction.