Hello, my website - (www.plantingarden.com) have some randomly selected "Intros" (they will change with each page refresh) of the articles on its top part (on the main page only). The question - will google consider this as cloaking?
This is not cloaking. Cloaking is to purposely provide different content for users and search engine spiders. There is no problem with rotating content....as far as penalties anyway. It might not be very good from an seo perspective though. Basically your website would be focusing on different keywords each time Google visits. Since it is the content at the top of the page, this could be a problem. It would probably be better if that section was in a div near the bottom of the code and set to display at an absolute position.
Yah, i will move this part to the bottom and will make it as "Latest Articles"... (not just random), so changes will occur not that often.
Yes that will probably be better. You could still have a random list of articles somewhere, but maybe exclude the description so that not so much text is changing.
cloaking is black hat technique. but to make your article random is not being to consider cloaking by Google.