Question

We all know that showing inexistent stuff to Google bots is not allowed and will hurt the search positioning but what about the other way around; showing stuff to visitors that are not displayed for Google bots?

I need to do this because I have photo pages each with the short title and the photo along with textarea containing the embed HTML code. googlebot is taking the embed code and putting it at the page description on its search results which is very ugly.

Please advise.

Answer 1

When you start playing with tricks like that, you need to consider several things.

… showing stuff to visitors that are not displayed for Google bots.

That approach is a bit tricky.

• You can certainly check User-agents to see if a visitor is Googlebot, but Google can add any number of new spiders with different User-agents, which will index your images in the end. You will have to constantly monitor that.
• Testing of each code release your website will have to check “images and Googlebot” scenario. That will extend testing phase and testing cost.
• That can also affect future development – all changes will have to be done with “images and Googlebot” scenario in mind which can introduce additional constraints to your system.

Personally I would choose a bit different approach:

• First of all review if you can use any methods recommended by Google. Google provides a few nice pages describing that problem e.g. Blocking Google or Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file.
• If that is not enough, maybe restructuring of you HTML would help. Consider using JavaScript to build some customer facing interfaces.
• And whatever you do, try to keep it as simple as possible, otherwise very complex solutions can turn around and bite you.

It is very difficult to give you very good advise without knowledge of your system, constraints and strategy. But I hope my answer will help you out to choose good architecture / solution for your system.