[falter]

Originally Posted by Triple_T

Just a warning here... I was reading about seo and step 3 might not be such a good idea. This is called cloaking and it is a black hat technique. It is clearly stated in the google quality terms as a forbidden way to SEO.

Actually I found out after installing this, my pagerank for my homepage did go down 4 pages for a very important keyword, I didn't do anything else that could be suspicious so I removed this!

The sitemap is good, but optimizing pages just for search engines and make them look different from what you human visitors see, is NOT recommended and you take a high risk for being penalized by google or other SE.

if you impelemented the robots.txt that is suggested, that is most likely the cause of your PR drop, and not due to the cloaking.

There are many, many things that you can do that are considered cloaking. I don't think google would flip out over this seeing as the content that is provided to the search engine spider is the same content that is provided to the human user. An example of an abuse of cloaking is where, say, a completely different set of content is given to the spider than that which is given to the human.

I'm going to pubcon (http://www.pubcon.com) in a couple weeks; I'll ask around to see what some SEO's think about what we're doing here. I can even ask guys at yahoo and google. Personally, I think it's fine, since the same core content is being given to the search engines and humans.