: Is offering Google Bot a lite version of site skin considered cloaking? If you have multiple templates a user can choose from on a site (like a forum), and you offer Google Bot a "lite" skin,

@Heady270

It is cloaking it the lite skin is not the same default skin that you offer new users. Googlebot wants to see exactly what a user coming in from Google search is going to see. If you choose a different skin based on user agent, then Google may automatically detect this and penalize you. They sometimes make requests using a normal browser user agent to test for cloaking.

Regardless of whether or not it is cloaking, you may not want to use a different skin for googlebot. The contents that googlebot fetch are used to create preview images for your site. If you use a lite skin for goooglebot, your site won't look great in the preview.

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@Nimeshi995

Using Multiple Themes is not Cloaking.

Its rather common the likes of forums have multiple themes and some sites will even use a lite version for Googlebot to save on resources. I would not be concerned at using agent based templates at all since the content itself remains untouched.

What Google determines cloaking is anything that is used to hide from Google to manipulate search results in one way or another. Such as:


Cloaking Links
Cloaking Urls
Cloaking Content (With no way of accessing this content/element i.e javascript display:block from display:none.)
Cloaked Redirects
Cloaking Affiliate Links

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