While I’m sure they’re trying to be helpful, it seems like nearly every time Google expands on a fuzzy definition from their guidelines or TOS it only leads to more confusion, at least for me.
I spent a lot of labor hours several months ago trying to get as much information as I could on Google’s position regarding paid links. I offer advertising on some of my company sites and wanted to ensure–while Google was slapping everyone around for paid linking–that I kept those business sites within “the rules according to Google”, or as close to being within them as I possibly could. Some pre-existing arrangements prevented me from complying 100% on some sites at that time.
During those long hours of researching Google’s stated positions, asking questions when needed and often waiting days for replies… I came across what appeared to be some straight forward advice from Google’s own SEO Strategist, Adam Lasnik, regarding the publication of paid links on a web site:
“It’s [nofollow] one of several tools you can use to avoid having PageRank passed. Other possible ways of accomplishing this are using JavaScript, and also redirecting through a page, a file or directory that is named in robots.txt as a page that should not be crawled. Nofollow works equally well; the key is that it tells us to not pass PageRank and related signals.”
Life was good, rather than bloat my HTML with silly “nofollow” tags that only Google seemed to give credit to anyway, I could use JavaScript to display paid links because the search engine bots won’t read (or follow) those links. Most of my paid link problems seemed solved.
Fast forward to this month and I find that Google has been kind enough to offer some definition clarifications on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. More information is always a good thing, right?
One of the clarifications that caught my attention right away was regarding Geolocation and the practice of serving specific content to visitors based upon their geographic location. I really think that making content delivery more personalized–which includes localized to the visitor–is going to be a major part of web development in the future. It already is for some services, but ultimately I think even smaller web sites are going to have to apply mechanisms for personalizing content in order to compete.
Google’s points on Geolocation were pretty simple and straight forward (again), just make sure that the Googlebot sees the same content a human visitor from the same IP address would see.
Then the shocker came… beneath Geolocation was Google’s clarification on the black-hat practice of Cloaking. Here’s how Google described cloaking in the clarification:
“Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you’re in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.”
This leaves me a little confused and worried, because if you take Lasnik’s advice from above and use JavaScript to display paid links which the bots won’t see but human users will, then wouldn’t that technically be “serving different content to users than to Googlebot”, which is a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines?
And forget about just paid links, what about the plethora of Web 2.0, Ajax enabled sites which are delivering dynamic content via JavaScript to users that bots aren’t seeing?
I understand that this may seem like I’m being nit-picky about a technicality, but given that we often don’t know something we’re doing is going to cause us search engine smack-downs until it happens I think there’s a valid concern here.
Is it still acceptable to use JavaScript to deliver content on our web pages, or is Google going to begin punishing (perhaps selectively) sites that do for “cloaking” under this newly clarified definition?
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