Does notifying the user of being listed as a bot, downgrade the website in search engines?

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

When designing a website, I wanted to skip some data operation for robots, So I have made a table which lists the IPs that are identified as a robot. Then on loading of any page,if the user's IP is listed in this table, some operations will be skipped. The problem is that this list may not be 100% accurate, So when a user is identified as a robot, a text will be shown (at the top of each page) to tell him that if he is wrongly listed, notify the website admin.

Now, my question is that Does showing this text for robots has any bad effects on google ranking?

The contents of the page for robots are essentially the same as normal users, except for that message.

manpreet 3 years ago

If that's the only extra text you are displaying, that should be ok, but if the content you show was very different between user and robots, then it would be considered as cloacking and you would be penalized.