Remove useless things for SE

Vbseo could remove, for unregistred users and SE, some unuseless links like Post reply buttons etc.... as an option of course, as an alternative of nofollow links. I am not sure you understand me right ?

I worry that removing new thread and reply buttons might lose me registrations. Let's say I have a good, juicy topic going and somebody wants to jump in and post. They click the post button and are told to register. Great. I got em.

But, if the button's not there, they might assume that the board is not accepting new posts, or they may just say "skip it. It's not worth the effort" and move on.

yes its that, but it could be an option, i agree with the reply issue, and i know, its possible to make that with templates, but url rewrite could be done this way as well, and we prefer to have it done by vbseo

I'd stay away from cloaking if I were you.
I've done it last month, but was so afraid that G would catch me that I decided to disable it.

But, if you want to try it, here is how I did:

I added this code to phpinclude_start:

PHP Code:

$isBot = (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Googlebot') == TRUE) Or (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Mediapartners-Google') == TRUE) Or (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSN Robot') == TRUE) Or (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Yahoo! Slurp') == TRUE); 


then

PHP Code:

<if condition="$isBot==false">
IRRELEVENT CONTENT (LIKE LOGO, LOGIN FORM, ETC...)
</if> 


I really wish Google could extend the rel=nofollow to standard tags. That way, it would be easy to exclude any non-relevent code/text:

PHP Code:

<p rel="nofollow">
useless welcome text...
</p> 


I forgot to add: I think cloaking is beyond vbSEO scope.

Many SEO/webmasters consider cloaking to be a black-hat technique.

vbSEO is rightly planted on the high ground in the middle of the road. Let's keep it this way. Black-hat techniques will help no one.

I was speaking about SE and unregistred users...

Originally Posted by berberber

I was speaking about SE and unregistred users...

Berberber,

Unless I understood your post, you're talking about hiding content from SE bots and guests, sorry, but this is cloaking.

Granted, it's justified. I replied in good faith and posted the code needed to achieve this. But I'm sure you already know it's a risky technique (read G webmaster guidelines)

What if G flag your website as using a spam technique?

Anyway, this is not a feature that vbSEO should offer, IMO.

its not cloaking to offer more links to registred members, its cloaking for search engines, to offer different content to a normal visitor and to search engines

If the exact webpage (content & code) served to non-registered users is the same as the one provided for the search engine crawlers, there would be no valid reason to consider this strategy "cloaking".

However, Amykhar raises a great point that should not be overlooked. We have to ensure that we are successfully converting members from the flow of web traffic. This is just one of the many areas where a cost-benefit analysis has to be done, in terms of SEO vs. general marketing principles.

At first glance, this does appear to be something that would be better suited for a template modification.