The home page of my site is pretty plain. I like it that way. But, I want to optimize it for search engines. I was thinking I could detect if it’s a search engine spider (msnbot, Googlebot, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo! Slurp, Zyborg, etc.) and output a keyword laden page for them and keep the plain page for everyone else.
Is there any problem with doing that?
Terry
The technique you describe is known as ‘cloaking’ and is frowned apon by the search engines, for fairly obvious reasons.
Most of the major search engines will ban your entire site if they discover that you are using cloaking techniques. Instead of receiving increased traffic from the search engines, you have a good chance of receiving none at all.
In my opinion, it is not worth the risk.
Mark
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Definitely have to agree with Raz here. Cloaking is a huge “no-no” to search engines. Having your site banned from Google is pretty devastating.
Check out Gordaen’s Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.