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Is this not effectively cloaking? Not at all. You are offering a very legitimate choice to users and you offer the same choice to bots. The option is clearly designed to maximize the user experience, not to manipulate search rankings. Googlebot has the ability to choose an option even thought it normally will not. Googlebot even has the ability to complete simple online forms entering a name, address, phone number, yes/no options, etc. I am confident it will understand your design. It is not all that different in concept to sites which offer content in various languages based on a manual choice.

I have the same question and i would love to hear more ideas.

Hi Chris - totally understand your question. The key is that the brand name is included in the search query and the test (in that particular case) was less about using the social networks for rankings, but to see if search volume itself and CTR could influence rankings (which it appeared to do). You can read more about the experiment on search volume and CTR here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/experiment-google-rankings-w-search-volume And more on the experiment to influence rankings with Google+ and Twitter here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings Those should help clarify. Cheers! Rand

I'd recommend ScribeSEO  (affiliate link) or http://scribeseo.com (non-affiliate link) Great tool for keyword checking right on the post as well as some basic SEO review.  It has a plugin that works great in WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.