Does a Website Overlay Hurt Ranking?

[Discountvc]

We are looking into personalizing visits on our website. Rather than to write Tb of code on each page, we want to use a little line of Java script on the page, that would allow to place overlay on the site, depending on the visitor. Example: Change the home page picture when a returning visitor comes back on the website and show him/her a different picture bases upon the pages he/she visited prior.

Would that overlay be caught by Google and would G have a problem with that?

We all know about cloaking, but G does not penalize for heat mapping overlays, for example. Or not to my knowledge they don't.

Thanks all for your personal insights!

Peter

[Discountvc]

Thank you Travis.

You are correct, Cloaking is what I am concerned about.

However, there is so much software coming out, that one questions whether an overlay from a 'respected' provider (CrazyEgg and alike) would be ignored by Google for cloaking purposes.

The software we wanted to test is Evergage.

Has anyone tried out this (type of) software and seen Google response from it?

Thanks guys for your opinions.

[Travis_Bailey]

Showing search engines one thing and showing users another is likely always a bad thing. Your benign use case has probably already been used by nefarious folks. The Googles probably already know what Piwik, Crazy Egg and the like look like.

The Googles doesn't know Bob's Script. It would probably look like cloaking. It's actually displaying something different to a user, than what would be displayed to a search engine. That is the definition of cloaking.

I'm not saying there aren't ways around this. I just don't endorse the practice.