Navigation for search
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We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?
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I would never recommend altering your site in any way specifically for a bot. Google has repeatedly stated that would be seen as cloaking and you definitely run the risk of a penalty. It can happen any time. Do you really want that cloud over your head?
Even if Amazon is able to do it, you are not Amazon. Despite any statement to the contrary, a huge site like Amazon can do things that you or I may not be able to do. We can debate the fairness of it, but we are not on a level playing field with them.
You seem to really want to do this, so feel free. But x months from now you will likely make a post "My rankings dropped and I can't figure out why", and then someone will notice the setting and that will be the answer.
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Could you please share the site in question? we might be able to give a much more insightful thought
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Thanks for your suggestion Alex!
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All the content will be accessible through the sitemap which will be displayed in both versions (the user and the bot) version of the site. The only difference is the navigation will change from one version to another. It could be perceived as a gray area, even though we really are just making it more friendly to bots not trying to be deceptive at all.
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And that should be okay if they see the content is the same between your normal version and the spider version, just a difference in presentation. It becomes a problem when you start serving drastically different content.
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How about adding an indexable version of the navigation and then hiding it with CSS? The crawlers would see that. I haven't thought about whether that'd be a good idea, just a quick thought.
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We usually operate under the principal that would this be ok if it were manually reviewed? In our plan, I am pretty confident that it would pass. We are planning on making what is displayed to bots very basic text link navigation. Our XML and html sitemaps will correspond well with the bot navigation (so to show G we really are not trying to hide anything). And yes we could make the nav more search friendly, but one of our main goals is to have the site look as clean as possible. As far as I can tell Amazon uses this method to avoid duplicate content issues and make their site generally more crawlable which is why I think it is on the table as an option.
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Depending on how much you're changing, I think it could be considered cloaking and end up getting you in trouble. You'll get looked at any time you're sniffing for bots and serving up different content. Are there other ways you could make the navigation index-able?
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