I have a website that I am going to advertise using PPC, but for different keywords I will be using ad copy targeted to those keywords.

I will employ cookie based cloaking, meaning that a user will click on the ppc link, and a cookie will (try to) be set - if the cookie is set, they'll be directed to the copy optimized for the particular keywords; if the cookie is not set, they'll be directed to the main default page with a general ad copy.

When I say "directed" - I actually mean the page content will change; the actual URL will be the same for versions of the content.

Question:

Since search engine robots are scripts, they cannot accept cookies, correct? In this scenario, a robot wouldn't have a cookie, and so they would only view the main, default copy.


I eventually will use this method with other marketing methods, so at that time I will have to concern myself with how ethical this is in terms of search engine marketing.

I'm only looking for opinions on how this would sit with search engines, as technically I am intending to serve content to selected visitors that I am not showing to search engines (though "black hat" cloaking usually works the other way around).

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks.

If your competitors complain loudly enough, Google might look into it by hand. They prefer to do things algorithmically with computers, calling the approach "scalable" - a search for "the" returns 5.2 b pages - but they don't rely on it exclusively.

I have no idea how this would sit with the search companies, someone with more knowledge is going to have to answer that part ... but I want to point out that while most bots don't understand cookies, GoogleBot isn't the company's only window to the internet.

Thanks for your response.

I'm a little torn on it, as the page will be more or less a lead capture page, but there will be, and is, other content on the site.

I wouldn't be concerned if it was strictly a product website, I could generate enough visitors from ppc/affiliate promotion that I could do without the help from natural search traffic. . . but the site already has content I would prefer that I didn't mess things up.

Any other thoughts on this?

I have a website that I am going to advertise using PPC, but for different keywords I will be using ad copy targeted to those keywords.

As is perfectly normal for landing pages in PPC campaigns.

the google crawler will probably never ever "see" the PPC links. The vast majority of PPC ads are written onto the pages by javascript, crawlers don't trigger javascript so the ads never get shown.

I was not thinking about that fact, that clears some things up for me.

Thanks.