I run a web service that allows user to quickly create chat rooms. These chat rooms always have a title (which is displayed within <h1> tags) and optionally have a description. But besides these two snippets, search engines and Google AdSense bots have no idea what the chat room is about or what kind of advertisements the room’s visitors might find interesting.
Normally new visitors to a room see none of the room’s previous message history. Is it considered cloaking to show the entire message history to search engines but not regular users? Is there an alternative way that I can increase the relevancy of AdSense Ads and the keywords that appear on the chat room page?
This chat service is designed to be simple and minimalist. I don’t want to burden the user by forcing them to type out relevant keywords.
It’s not a good idea to show something to users and something different to google, but are you trying to get these chat rooms indexed? I’m not sure how that will work if they have only a title and H1 but no persistent content, I can’t see them ranking well with just that anyway.
Adsense may not be your best advertising option for a chat room. It has a notoriously bad ctr ON FORUMS SO i can’t imagine chat rooms getting much better.
I agree, it’s a bad idea to start trying to feed AdSense the ever changing contents of a chat room, you would be better off cloaking the content of the messages and serving some nice static advertisements (or sponsored ad’s) as you may run the risk of getting booted (if you cloak or differentiate what’s viewable) and I doubt many visitors would enjoy having their conversations spied upon for advertisements, better to take the generic route and save yourself hassle.
