I use content negotiation to switch between application/xhtml+xml and text/html just like you describe, without noticing any problems with search bots. Strictly though, you should take into account the q values in the accept header that indicates the preference of the user agent to each content type. If a user agent prefers to accept text/html but will accept application/xhtml+xml as an alternate, then for greatest safety you should have the page served as text/html.