Disqus integration and cloaking
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Hey everyone,
I have a fairly specific question on cloaking and whether our integration with disqus might be viewed as cloaking.
Here is the setup. We have a site that runs off of drupal and would like to convert the comment handling to disqus for ease of our users. However, when javasrcript is disabled the nice comment system and all of the comments from disqus disappear. This obviously isn't good for SEO, however the user experience using disqus is way better than the native comment system. So here is how we are addressing the problem. With drupal we can sync comments between the native comment system and disqus. When a user has javascript enabled the containing div for the native comment system is set to display:none. hiding the submission form and all of the content and instead displaying it through the disqus interface. However when javascrip is not enabled the native comment form and the comments will be available to the user.
Could this be considered cloaking by google? I know they do not like hidden div's, but it should be almost exactly the same content being displayed to the user (depending on when the last sync was run).
Thanks for your thoughts, and if anyone has familiarity with a better way to integrate drupal and disqus I am all ears.
Josh
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Thanks John,
That link was helpful, it is a similar concept but we are not using ajax. I appreciate your response.
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It's not considered cloaking when you're giving the same information in two different ways, an improved version for users, and a different version for the search bots which they can read. If you look at http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html, the HTML snapshot method they're recommending is serving the bot an HTML snapshot of a page, rather than using AJAX to render it (or parts of it). This sounds similar to what you're doing.
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