Optimising content for search bots: cloaking or genius?

Moving key content to the top of the page is for bots, not for users?

For some people, cloaking.

For others, genius.

Google wants to see the most relevant, topical page content as high up on the page as possible (AI bots trivially need this).

On large e-commerce sites UX will always win the battle against SEO, which means your precious H1, key text and blocks FAQ buried under a few seconds of render time.

The very idea of giving to bots not that to users instantly scares off many seoshniks.

Understandably so.

Google has made a lot of noise around tightening the screws on bad practices, and cloaking has become an umbrella term for any deliberate actions for the sake of searchers that users don't see for themselves.

But if you boil the dry residue out of Google's cloaking documentation, the examples there are clear and hard-hitting:

1. Showing a page about travel destinations to searchers when showing a page about discount drugs to users
2. Inserting text or keys into the page only when the user agent requesting the page is a search engine

(...And not a word about moving what's already on the page )

One of my clients has one of my clients in Botify - of a fairly large national retailer is a combination of Pageworkers и Speedworkers, he writes Stephen Cook.

They were eager to capitalise on this to test a hypothesis: what if we took the content that Google hits best and stuck it at the top of our most important pages?

So we got to work.

We took a random cohort of listings that yielded moderate traffic.

We pulled out H1, block SEO-text and content FAQ, that were sewn underneath the product grid and stuck them at the top of the page.

These pages were given exclusively to googlebot (and all the other search bots that Speedworkers serves).

100 urls.

Split Test.

The test group took off instantly - consistently garnering about 300 to 400 extra clicks and 70-80k extra impressions DAILY.

As much as we liked the idea, we couldn't believe the results ourselves.

But that's the beauty of tests.

You don't believe me?

Well, now we're only one download away from Pageworkers from rolling out new test urls.

Time to prove this theory over and over again.

I also think I've seen enough to say with confidence: it's probably not cloaking.