Member Avatar for Dani

We use the usersgent to determine if you are a mobile browser and, if you are, we show you full page AdSense ads and don't load some JavaScript functionality. Can this get us in trouble with google for cloaking? Especially since some intrusive ads are shown with some useragentd but not others?

AdSense had its JavaScript that you can copy/paste for full page ads, but it only displays an ad if you are in a mobile browser. I don't see the point of adding the overhead of downloading and executing the script if we are on a desktop.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

I wouldn't call it cloaking but https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en does give us pause that we could run afoul of Google's view on this.

I think User Agent Content Negotiation ( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation ) is not uncommon and I see no problem with that.

That is, if the content on the page differs, ie you get 10 items on mobile and 5 items on desktop but give 12 items to the search engine then the link/answer in paragraph one tells us we are in possible trouble.

What I could not find out is if Google's search bot looks for this.

Member Avatar for Dani

I'll just play it safe and go back to showing the JavaScript for the ads to everyone, even though the ads never display for desktop.

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