I'm trying to reduce the number of on-page links on an ecommerce site to give greater control with my link building efforts and also to fix some duplicate content problems.

Amazon currently do this. If you check any category page within Amazon you will see the "shop all departments" content is not displayed in Google's cache.

I need to hide the side navigation on all category pages from Googlebot - what is the best way to do this? Can anyone point me in the direction of a script or simple method I can use within my template files?

Hello,

The best method is the reverse dns lookup, check this :

Code:

hxxp://www_google_com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80553

Remove xx and _

And if you know php, a little script :

PHP Code:


<?php

$dns=gethostbyaddr($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]);

$googlebot=strpos($dns,"googlebot");

if($googlebot !== false) { 

YOUR CLOAKED PAGE

}else {

YOUR STANDARD PAGE

}
?>