For cloaking, what is the difference between the two examples Google gives: changes based on user agent, and text instead of flash to bots?

Question

In that Google documentation about cloaking it is explained that cloaking could be either:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users

• Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

I don't recognize any essential difference between the two examples because in both we give a non web-browser user-agent different content than we would give to a web-browser user-agent.

Do you recognize any essential difference?

Answer 1

I don't see the point in the question since cloaking is rather simple, what your users see, is what search engines should see. Analysing what one Google employee has written changes nothing and therefore technically, you're wasting your time by doing so.

But I will for the sake of it point out the differences in the two examples:

Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users

The first example is merely pointing out you should not serve one version to search engines and then a different version to your visitors.

Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

The second example is also letting you know this includes adding additional content like a extra paragraph or anything else that is not visible to users but is for search engines. This is cloaking and can also be classified as keyword stuffing.

Bottom line is those examples are written by a human, they ain't perfect but if you're having to ask, then chances are you're bordering on something you know you shouldn't be doing.