Does Google allow cloaking on mobile?

Thu 19 November 2009 14:45, Editors

Cloaking is not done with Google, that's something everybody will know. A post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog however does point towards cloaking being a possibility. You just have to be careful.

In the post Google says "make sure that the content on the corresponding mobile/desktop URL matches as closely as possible." They address the topic of sites having the same URL on both mobile and web. They warn for cloaking, but n a way they are saying you can cloak a desktop site to your mobile site.

They talk about switching content based on User-agent:

"However, note that if you fail to configure your site correctly, your site could be considered to be cloaking, which can lead to your site disappearing from our search results. Cloaking refers to an attempt to boost search result rankings by serving different content to Googlebot than to regular users. This causes problems such as less relevant results (pages appear in search results even though their content is actually unrelated to what users see/want), so we take cloaking very seriously.

So what does "the page that the user sees" mean if you provide both versions with a URL? As I mentioned in the previous post, Google uses "Googlebot" for web search and "Googlebot-Mobile" for mobile search. To remain within our guidelines, you should serve the same content to Googlebot as a typical desktop user would see, and the same content to Googlebot-Mobile as you would to the browser on a typical mobile device. It's fine if the contents for Googlebot are different from the one for Googlebot-Mobile.

One example of how you could be unintentionally detected for cloaking is if your site returns a message like "Please access from mobile phones" to desktop browsers, but then returns a full mobile version to both crawlers (so Googlebot receives the mobile version). In this case, the page which web search users see (e.g. "Please access from mobile phones") is different from the page which Googlebot crawls (e.g. "Welcome to my site"). Again, we detect cloaking because we want to serve users the same relevant content that Googlebot or Googlebot-Mobile crawled."

Let us know what your take is on this.

<Our Daily Search Pic(k): UK SERP...

Bing taking its time to roll out...>

Comment

Why Yandex loses market share

Wed 8 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

0 comments

Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, has been losing market share for some time now. According to Liveinternet.ru, over the last year Yandex’s market sh...... read more

Vkontakte loses copyright battle

Tue 7 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

0 comments

Vkontakte, the most important social network in Russia, has recently lost a copyright case to Gala Music Group who claimed their rights for the content posted by Vk...... read more

Futubra... “Twitter for housewives”

Fri 3 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

1 comment

On January 16th Russian internet giant Mail.ru Group launched Futubra, a Russian-language microblogging service. Two weeks into the launch it had almost 50000 users an...... read more

‘Have Florida - Will Travel’

Wed 1 Feb 2012, Ramcy Simoons

0 comments

As Gallant Grand Old Party nominee Romney one upped or better put smacked the Gator daylights out of ole Gingrich or ‘G-rich’ for insiders (Comedy Central)...... read more