SEO / Ethics Question (Opinion)

[big_nerd]

I have a question that a colleague has brought to me,

Is it unethical, or "bad publicity" or be considered "black hat" SEO techniques to have PHP detect the USER agent, looking for known bots, and modify the content before displaying.

Lets say for arguments sakes, not to have different content per-say (which I know be a violation) but to have the system bold keywords which may not look visually appealing otherwise.

As in, page "stuff" has the words "stuff, beer, hops, barley, fish" as their target keywords, and the PHP script would bold (with strong tags) each of these only for google bots sake.

I am leaning towards unethical and recommending against it, not only because it is technically different content, but also they should be able to use bold/ h1/ h2 / etc within the page effectively and still yield a good SEO result, that OR subscribe to an SEO Expert.

Looking for your opinions..

I am against it, but it makes me wonder if it would even have an effect?

[knowj]

Google and other large Search companies are wise to this. Not all their bots will have obvious user agents and it is likely they will force headers to use common browsers for testing such things.

I would give you a month max on Google before they block you for black hat.

Quality content, Emphasising the important aspects of the content (headings, bold, size contrast between background etc...), Links through to pages that expand on important content again with quality content. Quality link building, Titles and Descriptions relevant to page content.Register a domain for a long period of time and the duration the domain has been registered.

SEO isn't rocket science just highly competitive depending on your market.

[big_nerd]

knowj,

Thanks, again I am not SEO Expert so I wanted to give a proper opinion.

Once again thanks for the insight.