Personalized Content Vs. Cloaking

[znotes]

Hi Moz Community,

I have a question about personalization of content, can we serve personalized content without being penalized for serving different content to robots vs. users? If content starts in the same initial state for all users, including crawlers, is it safe to assume there should be no impact on SEO because personalization will not happen for anyone until there is some interaction?

Thanks,

[KaneJamison]

It sounds like you're on the right track. If users and bots start off with the same content, that's a good start.

From there, the question is "how much content is being customized, and how frequently?" For example, if you're swapping out 5 different headlines for 40% of users, and 60% of users see the original, that's not a big deal, particularly if the rest of the page is the same.

But if you're swapping out 80% of page copy (eg removing a bunch of excess copy that is shown for SEO purposes), and 60-90% of users are seeing that "light" version of the page, you run the risk of two things:

1. First, the chance that it wouldn't pass a manual review if one was performed.
2. Second, the chance that Google may render a copy of the page as a user (not announcing themselves as a crawler), seeing a different version of the page multiple times, and then effectively devaluing the missing content, or worse, flagging the page in their system as cloaked content.

We could get lost in details of whether or not they're doing this, or how they're doing this, but from a technology standpoint it's pretty simply for them to render content from non-official IPs and user-agents and do an 'honesty check' for situations where content is showing up multiple ways. This is already how them compare the page on desktop vs mobile to see which sections of the page render, and which are changed.

I think you are also right to rely on site interaction before personalizing, but since there are multiple ways to do that, you should know that it's possible for Google to simulate some of those interactions. So there's a chance at some point they will render your content in a personalized manner, particularly if personalization is the result of visiting a URL or clicking a simple toggle switch or button.