Question

I have a site which has been developed completely in flash. Now the site owners do not want to shift to a more text/html based site. So am planning to create an alternative html/text based site which the googlebot will get redirected to. (By checking the useragent). My question is that is this allowed officially by google?

If not then how come there are many subscription based sites which display a different set of data to google compared to the users? Is that allowed?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

I’ve dealt with this exact scenario for a large ecommerce site and Google essentially ignored the site. Google considers it cloaking and addresses it directly here and says:

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Instead, create an ADA compliant version of the website so that users with screen readers and vision aids can use your web site. As long as there as link from your home page to your ADA compliant pages, Google will index them.