Legitimate URL Cloaking for SEO?

Question

I have just asked these two questions, one on flash seo url best practices and one on url redirects for seo in flash, and it got me to read more about cloaking and sneaky javascript redirects.

In that cloaking and sneaky javascript redirects article, it says:

"Provide the textual contents of JavaScript in a noscript tag... Ensure that you provide the same content in both elements (for instance, provide the same text in the JavaScript as in the noscript tag). Including substantially different content in the alternate element may cause Google to take action on the site."

"Use of JavaScript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of JavaScript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. For instance, placing different text in JavaScript than in a noscript tag violates our webmaster guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the JavaScript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text)."

To me that sounds like, if you have a Flash site, and you want it to be SEO, then if you render to google an html page with the same textual content as the flash swf, then you are safe. As long as I am not "with the intent to deceive search engines" and am not "including substantially different content in the alternate [flash] element", am I safe? Is that legitimate? Has anyone verified this?

I also get from that set of webmaster guidelines that it would be acceptable to redirect a url like site.com/home.html to site.com/#/home for flash users, because the intent is not to deceive and if they are only differing by the "View", with the "Model" staying the same, is that legitimate?

They say in that article too:

"Note that placement of links within JavaScript is alone not deceptive. When examining JavaScript on your site to ensure your site adheres to our guidelines, consider the intent."

... so it seems like this would be a legitimate solution, no? That is, redirecting users to the appropriate flash url, and rendering html for necessary accessibility and SEO.

I understand the malicious-ness that can arise out of sneakyness and cloaking, but that is definitely not the intent. I am looking for something more along the lines of, how could I accomplish this without google getting angry?

I honestly don't see how google would be able to tell if I added something in Rails that checked for the user agent and rendered a flash-less html page for google using something like this: turn off rails sessions for robots. If I checked for the user agent and only redirected the user, not the google bot, would google be able to see that?

Update

Is something like this Fleb Flash Framework "cloaking"? They have a div element which, either returns a flash swf or plain html content. Or this on SEO with Flash

Fundy

Answer 1

You might be interested in Google's improved Flash indexing capabilities. Even with a pure Flash site you can still get good SEO, especially of you're getting high quality inbound links.

The redirection technique you're planning sounds legitimate, but there's still a risk it might appear suspicious to Google's indexing algorithms.

Nightspot

is there any info on how "it might appear suspicious", from a technical standpoint. I keep hearing that but I haven't seen exactly how they determine what's suspicious. – Fundy

No, Google don't publish the criteria details, otherwise they could be circumvented by malicious black hat SEOs. – Nightspot

@viatropos: That's because there isn't some some open-source algorithm Google's released to tell us how they determine what's suspicious. Some sites manage to get away with cloaking, while others have been punished for seemingly harmless IP-sniffing. There's the whole discipline of black-hat SEO dedicated to figuring out how to game Google, and even they get shot down regularly. – Schoenfeld