Im wondering whether functional cloaking would be allowed by the major search engines as opposed to content cloaking. The situation is as follows: There is a site build in an Ajax framework. The site is a RIA, with 1 pagerefresh. To allow people to bookmark and communicate different 'pages' (they're really states of the application) and to use the back and forward functionality of the browser, a hash # is used in the url + extra information to determine the state. There are 2 problems here from a SEO perspective; the site isn't indexable, since the content is loaded with JS. The urls arent crawlable because of the # in the url. So what I'm thinking at this moment is building a 'shadow site', that will be using the exact same content, only in html and via seo friendly urls. Then I'd check whether a visitor is a SE or a reall visitor, and rewrite the url accordingly. Obviously this would be a cloaking method, which isn't allowed. But I think the Search Engines have stated in the terms that you are not allowed to show the search engines different content. Since we'd be using the same content, only another technical way of presenting it, would that be ok you think?
I don't see the situation much different than a flash site that has an HTML version of its content. As long as the main site isn't able to be indexed and has the same content as the visitors see, I wouldn't see a problem. Google wouldn't even be able to tell (as far as I know. Don't take my word on that).
Don't see it as "give Google something else" but as "give users without JavaScript something else" and you'll be fine.
hehe.. yeah that's what I thought. Someone within Google was telling me this approach was gunning for trouble though... but I can't imagine?
and that would be??... I'm sorry but you act as the solution is obvious, but to my opinion it's not (unfortunately).