Cloaking, what do you think about this example ?

[drikmaslik]

Hey,

I was going thru some of results and notice that those guys showing different content to google bots instead of regular users: http://www.classifiedads.com/apartments-299.html

vs. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SHGpkhEinwcJ:www.classifiedads.com/apartments-299.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca.

It looks like they using geo targeting for regular user and showing general stuff for google.

Can they get a penalty for it? Or is it 100% safe to do that?

[CleverPhD]

Yep, this is a geotargeted page.  That said, I am not sure it is "cloaking".   I have a site where on all pages of the site we have a sidebar that shows geolocated data specific to that user.  The info in that sidebar is different for different users.  It is not "cloaking" as even though I am showing different information to different users (based on location), I am treating all users the same.

Regardless of how "safe" using geolocation is, I do not think it makes sense the way that this site/page is doing it.  Would be better to have a dedicated "$cityname apartment" page so that Google can crawl it and let you rank for that page.  Not sure that Google would penalize this as much as not being able to tell what the focus of the page is to categorize it properly for the correct location search.

What keyword is this page ranking for ?

P

[drikmaslik]

its general keywords not related to specific location so i think they did it to get better ranking, its more easy to link from main domain to lets say 100 categories than linking to 100 categories x 100 cities =10,000

what makes me think that its cloaking is for all visitors they do provide specific location but not for google bot, for google bot they showing page with ads around the world, but google bot as every other bot have an ip which related to specific location

[RuthBurrReedy]

I agree with CleverPhD - personalizing content to the user isn't necessarily cloaking. It's fairly common to show search engines a "default" page with all the available options when personalizing results to the user based on location. I doubt that this instance will result in a penalty - although, as CleverPhD points out above, it's not the best solution for other reasons.