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Comment by earl | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what the deal is, but it's weird on SO's part. If the issue is, as a sibling comment says, presentation html / js confusing G's crawler, then you email your account manager at Google and it will almost certainly be completely kosher to show the G scraper different material than is displayed, as long as the difference is true to the intent of the searcher. So you can present the G crawler just questions and answers with no javascript and no additional markup.

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Good idea, but I have no idea who our account manager is at Google. Do we even have an 'account manager'? what do they manage exactly, we don't do any adsense. I'll try to find out. but I'm kinda skeptical this approach (serve googlebot one set of content, everyone else something else) is something that Google would actually want to encourage at scale on any site.

Obvious question, but have you reached out to Matt Cutts yet?

I'll try, but Matt is a busy guy.

He is, but he's exceptionally helpful and generous with his time. Has my utmost respect.

I'm looking into this a bit now. It's not a clearcut situation, in that SO has a license that allows copying. Jeff, drop me an email and let's talk about it more (I followed you on Twitter so you can DM me).

The specific example at http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/5385/page-appe... is ranking SO at #1 for me now, but if you send some more examples I'm happy to chat with people in the search quality team about this.

Cloaking (the name for faking out the google-bot) is NOT cool by Google. There are ways to accomplish the same thing without cloaking, for example making sure content loads first, keeping markup and presentation away from the main HTML, etc.

Are you sure? I thought they were generally ok with it as long as it was the same information the user sees, just presented differently to help Google index it better

No, cloaking is a violation of our quality guidelines.

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