Can I show different content to Google Bot

My friends told me that nav - content - nav layout hurts SEO, So I have come up with a plan to show different pages to Google bot, but will it get me banned from Google ?

 

Nav - Content - Nav is fine. Much of the web uses this format. It has no effect on ranking.

If your talking about cloaking only because of this simple reason, then you shouldnt because its unreasonable.

 

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

 

Google only allows that to very trustworthy sites (like the NY times and such). So I think you should not risk this.

 

I cloak my site and I have very high rankings.

Google itself cloaks & geo-targets.

IMO their is nothing wrong with cloaking (as long as it's used reasonably)

For example, I use cloaking on one of my sites to remove the session ID's from the URLs.

I have seen ABSOLUTELY NO drop in rankings / penalties because of this.

Post again if you want a copy of the code I use to ID the bots (G,MSN & Y)


DoA

 

Google and other search engines should drop sites which present different content to them than they do to ordinary visitors. While DoA is just cleaning up URLs -- which is not really the same thing -- other want to show a completely different, highly optimized page for keywords.

Carried to its extreme, Google's AdSense search bots would see a page which is designed to attract ad links for higher paying keywords than would otherwise appear on the page.

This type of strategy helps explain why search engine results show a growing number if fake websites where nearly every link is an ad and where the search result snippet is not the same as the actual page. This lessens the value of search engines, in general, and programs such as AdWords and AdSense in particular.

 

dont try to fool google or any other search engine. go for the long term and get a good site and reputation.

 

do not do that. this will be a result to be banned for google

 

Not the best idea for the long run.
It's not that difficult to report sites these days.

 

I’ve been reading a few articles about Google on its Google Webmaster Tools section and what they say is to keep things simple and with no tricks. The important thing is that Google crawls your site and if they’re doing that I don’t see why change anything.

 

seems whitehat doesn't work anymore, im considering using different tactics, my site obeys all rules, then 5 days a go drops completely out of the serps... lol, cloaked sites and spam blogs have the upperhand

 

I think google don't like webmasters to show different content to him then visitors. If you are using javascript based drop down menus etc., then you should use noscript tag to present same urls to google and visitors-without-javascript enabled.

Geo-targetting should also be fine with google, but what google hates is like "You are should H1 tags to google but not to visitors" or stuff like that. Of forwarding your page using javascript to other website or other page.