Recently, Matt Cutts posted a detailed video on cloaking but did not touch on the specific issue of serving up different content or pages based on the browser accessing the web page. He did discuss serving up content based on geo-location and mobile users.

One webmaster/developer asked a question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about browser specific cloaking and if it was allowed.

Google’s Matt Cutts provided a rare response in the forum, answering the question in short by saying, “the easiest explanation is to serve Googlebot a safe version of your page that would work in any browser that you support with the expectation that someone viewing the cached version of a page could be using any browser.”

But he provides a really long answer as well and I figured most of you have no idea he posted on it. So here is his answer:

So there you have it – unsure, ask in the Google forums.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Image credit: Sam Cornwell / ShutterStock.