Charity project for local women's shelter - need help: will Google notice if you alter the document title with Javascript after the page loads?
-
I am doing some pro-bono work with a local shelter for female victims of domestic abuse. I am trying to help visitors to the site cover their tracks by employing a document.title change when the page loads using JavaScript. This shelter receives a lot of traffic from Google. I worry that the Google bots will see this javascript change and somehow penalize this site or modify the title in the SERPs. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of javascript maneuver? All help would be greatly appreciated!
-
I would set up a test first, as i have not used it myself. It may not work on all browsers.
good luck
-
Alan -
Wow, great response. I really appreciate your help. The ASP solution does look sophisticated; I think I will look into that as a longer term solution/more sustainable solution.
Cheers!
Jeff
-
There is a way to do this but you need to be using ASP.Net and is a fair bit of work http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc488548.aspx
These 2 solutions do not remove from addres bar in IE, but do remove from history
history.go(-1);
window.location.href = 'http://thatsit.com.au'
window.location.replace('fakePage.html')
-
There is a way of replacing your page in history, but this does not remove it from the address bar drop down, I think this was a way for old browsers. I am not sure if it is clocking either.
window.location.replace('fakePage.html')
There is a way to check if the user is uing private browsing, but its not easy, you need to check the color of a visisted link. But by this time they have already landed on your page.
I have to say i dont know a way around, if i think of somthing I will get back
-
does it? OK I didnt think it would.
There is a way of making sure you do not appear in the history but i cant remember how it was done.
give me a moment and illl try and find an old website where i did somthingh like this.
-
Alan, thank you. Changing the title does refresh how the entry appears in the browser history. The cloaking issue is what I am worried about - you believe Google will see this and penalize?
-
Ryan, thank you so much for your thorough answer. I appreciate the help!
-
Thank you, Rand. I'll be emailing you shortly.
-
jkonowitch - if you want to email me privately with more detail, I'd be happy to help and leverage any contacts I can as well (if necessary). Broadly speaking, I might suggest that a javascript title change may be less valuable than helping visitors understand how to more fully remove obvious signs in their browser/on their computer.
-
Security and Accessibility are always at odds. The easier information is to access, the less secure it is and vice versa.
You can place your site behind a login which would require all users to register. Google will then have a lot less information about your site and any visitor activity. The problem will then be your pages will no longer be listed in Google's index.
Any additional security really needs to come from the end of the person surfing your site. They could visit your site through a proxy server, clear cache, clear cookies, etc. You can help users by educating them on these steps. There are numerous counter-balances as well. If you are attempting to improve user security, the above can help but it is far from perfect. A pc can have tracking software installed, a router can trace activity, etc.
-
How is that going to cover their tracks? the origianl title will show in any history. and you can simply use in private browsing to hide where you have visited if that is your aim. Gogole may not notice but if and when they do you will be done for cloaking.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to handle images (lazy loading, compressing, caching...) to impact page load and thus SEO?
Hi all, I am looking for a conclusive answer on how to handle images on Wordpress websites. Most of the time we encounter the same problems regarding images. There are several options to make sure that images don't increase page load too much: Page caching and compressing: standard Lazy loading: helps decrease page load time, but Google might not crawl the images so not good for SEO. See this article on Googlebot scrolling. Correct image format (for example WebP): tried it several times and doesn't help much to decrease page load time. What is best practice? Are there standards or preferred options for the image dimensions and quality (max height, width, number of pixels, rectangular or square) before you upload it, also regarding responsiveness? Is it better to use .jpg, .png or WebP? To sum up, what should you do by default to handle images on websites so you can still have a good page speed even with loads of images? Thanks for your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Print pages returning 404's
Print pages on one of our sister sites are returning 404's in our crawl but are visible when clicked on. Here is one example: https://www.theelementsofliving.com/recipe/citrus-energy-boosting-smoothie/print Any ideas as to why these are returning errors? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FirstService0 -
Does including your site in Google News (and Google) Alerts helps with SEO?
Based on the following article http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm in order to check if you are included you need to run site:domain.com and click the news search tab. If you are not there then... I ran the test on MOZ and got no results which surprised me. Next step according to :https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en#ts=3179198 is to submit your site for inclusion. Should I? Will it help? P.S.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This is a followup question to the following: http://moz.com/community/q/what-makes-a-site-appear-in-google-alerts-and-does-it-mean-anything0 -
Google is ranking the wrong page and I don't know why?
I have an E-Commerce store and to make things easy, let's say I am selling shoes. There is: Category named 'Shoes' and 3 products 'Sport shoes', 'Hiking shoes' and 'Dancing shoes' My problem: For the keyword 'Shoes' Google is showing the product result 'Sport shoes'. This makes no sense from user perspective. (It's like searching for 'iPhone' and getting a result for 'iPhone 4s' instead of a general overview.) Now what are the specifics of my category page (Which I want Google to rank): It has more external links with higher quality It has more internal links It has much higher page authority It has useful text to guide the user for the keyword It is a category instead of a product All this given, I just don't know how I can signal Google that this page makes sense to show in SERPs? Hope you can help with this!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
Why my site it's not being indexed?
Hello.... I got to tell that I feel like a newbie (I am, but know I feel like it)... We were working with a client until january this year, they kept going on their own until september that they contacted us again... Someone on the team that handled things while we were gone, updated it´s robots.txt file to Disallow everything... for maybe 3 weeks before we were back in.... Additionally they were working on a different subdomain, the new version of the site and of course the didn't block the robots on that one. So now the whole site it's been duplicated, even it´s content, the exact same pages exist on the suddomain that was public the same time the other one was blocked. We came in changes the robots.txt file on both server, resend all the sitemaps, sent our URL on google+... everything the book says... but the site it´s not getting indexed. It's been 5 weeks now and no response what so ever. We were highly positioned on several important keywords and now it's gone. I now you guys can help, any advice will be highly appreciated. thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0 -
About to launch a new e-commerce site need help with anchor text's
Hey guys, I need some advice regarding the keywords I want to target for a new website. The website is e-commerce and is about 60% done but i wanted some advice. home page - http://www.diamondengagement.com/ For link building purposes I only want to target the domain name for the anchor text "diamond engagement" and "diamondengagement.com" for internal pages like .... http://www.diamondengagement.com/engagement-rings/ I want this page to rank for "engagement rings" but that's a very competitive keyword. I was thinking for the first 3 or 4 months I only build links to this page with the domain name again "diamond engagement" and phrase anchor text's using "diamond engagement" than just out right building "engagement rings" or "engagement ring" to start off. What are your thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | harrykabadaian0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0