What this site is doing? Does it look like cloaking to you?
-
Hi here,
I was studying our competitors SEO strategies, and I have noticed that one of our major competitors has setup something pretty weird from a SEO stand point for which I would like to know your thoughts about because I can't find a clear explanation for it.
Here is the deal: the site is musicnotes.com, and their product pages are located inside the /sheetmusic/ directory, so if you want to see all their product pages indexed on Google, you can just type in Google:
site:musicnotes.com inurl:/sheetmusic/
Then you will get about 290,000 indexed pages. No, here is the tricky part: try to click on one of those links, then you will get a 302 redirect to a page that includes a meta "noindex, nofollow" directive.
Isn't that pretty weird? Why would they want to "nonidex, nofollow" a page from a 302 redirect? And how in the heck the redirecting page is still in the index?!! And how Google can allow that?!
All this sounds weird to me and remind me spammy techniques of the 90s called "cloaking"... what do you think?
-
Sure I will! Thanks!
-
If you still need SEO and/or programming advice/work done after the summer let me know
-
Ok, nice to know.. we are always looking for passionate people that can work with us. Thanks!
-
At the moment I am very busy with a couple of projects. In general I do work as a SEO consultant.
Actually i'm a programmer, but down the line I started to fall in love with SEO and started to do that too. -
Yes, I'd like to know that tool.
A question: do you offer SEO consultation?
Thank you again Wesley.
-
Apperently Google keeps the original URL in the index as the source. It some ways it makes sense to do this.
It is still a pretty weird trick and I still don't know a good reason to do this. Would like to know if their are any consequences to this weird 'technique'. -
Thanks Wesley, that makes sense... but what's most weird to me is that Google keeps their pages in the index despite this trick... unless the 302 redirect allows legitimately that (maybe for a limited time)?
-
I don't think the word 'cloaking' is the right word since that is hiding content from users which you do want to present to the search engines. It is pretty weird though. A 302 should be a temporarily redirect and that they want to no-index the link it redirects to could make sense in some way.
If they are planning on changing the website then they could be temporarily redirecting the url's to new ones which they don't want to be indexed. When they have made the necessary changes they will remove the redirect and possibly the no-index pages.
Seems like a weird workaround but i've seen people thinking in weirder ways before.
It's more probably that they suffered from a panda or penguin update and that just like you they thought they could recover with a no-index (and a redirect?).Pretty weird story, curious to see if anyone else has some kind of explanation to why someone would set their site up like this.
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
-
My site is being deindexed for unknown reason
A few days ago I noticed that my site gusty.se was not showing up in google, only the subpages. There is no message in the google search console. I requested the site to be reindexed and about a day later the site was showing up in google again. Now another day has past and the site is now again not indexed in google. Question is why the site is being deindexed??? I have worked a bit with getting backlinks to the site and I did recently gain 3 backlinks within a few days (about a week has past since I gained these links). Still I can't believe Google would count this as unnatural link building, especially since I guess it will take some time for Google to detect new incoming links. Another thing I've notice though is that my site about two weeks ago got a high number of incoming links from different spam sites with .gq TLD's (see the attached screenshot). The majority of these sites have however not linked to my main page but to a sub page which still is indexed by Google. Can all these spamlinks be the reason to why Google has deindexed the main page of my site? I've read that Google in general ignore links from spam sites, still I have taken action against these spam sites by submitting a disavow text file containing all these spam domains. I submitted this file about 2 days ago. I have now again requested the site to be reindexed so perhaps will it soon be listed again. Still, I can't keep having my site deindexed and having me reindexing it every second day. I would really appreciate if someone could give me some insight in this problem. moz.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grodan21 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Big problems with site traffic
Hello! I have big problems with website promotion. It's been 7 months and the attendance on the site is 1-5 people a day. I do not understand the reason. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? Site: www.azartlist.com Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bobic1 -
Some site's links look different on google search. For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lutfigunduz0 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Does Automated High Quality Content Look Like Low Quality to Search Engines?
I have 1,000+ pages that all have very similar writing, but different results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Example:
Nr of days on market
Average sales price
Median sales price
etc etc etc All the results are very different for each neighborhood. However, as per the above, the wording is similar. The content is very valuable to users. However, I am concerned search engines may see it as low quality content, as wording is identical across all these pages (except the results). Any view on this? Any examples to back up such views?0 -
Why is my blog out-ranking my main site?
Please see attached ranking history chart. On June 5th the chart shows that my main site is not coming up under our main keyword "door hangers" From then on, our blog took over. Any ideas why? Thanks Andrea lpEBciu.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Critique My Site For SEO
Hi Everyone, I was wondering if someone might critique my site and let me know what you think. I've done pretty much everything I know to do proper seo for my site. I'd love to hear some critiques about what I am doing wrong. I'm not sure if my titles are okay, being that they are similar amongst pages. The other thing is that for all the javascript buttons on the top I have no followed them since they don't have any anchor text. The way google will crawl my page is through the links in the footer. I was thinking of moving them throughout the body of the page since I hear google isn't giving as much weight to footer links. I also wanted to hear what you think about putting a blog on my site and updating with fresh content as opposed to creating a separate blog and then linking back to my website with anchor text. Thanks for all the help. And glad to be a member Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wsh150