Showing Different Content To Members & Non-Members/Google and Cloaking Risk
-
How do we safely show logged-in members/Google one type of content on a page and logged out/non-members another kind of content without getting slammed for cloaking?
Right now we do this thing where we show Google everything on the page, but new visitors partial forum comments with the pitch to sign up and see full comments. So far, we have not gotten into trouble for this.
The new idea is to show non-members a lot of marketing messages and one kind of navigation and then once they sign up and are logged in, show different or no marketing messages and a different kind of navigation.
How do we stay out of trouble with this? Where is the cloaking line drawn? It's got me kinda nervous.
Thanks... Darcy
-
Wow...I didn't know this! Thanks Dirk for putting me in the 5000 Moz points club!
-
Hi Marie
Couldn't resist to like this - I noticed that you were only missing one like to reach the Moz Walhalla...
Congrats,
Dirk
-
I agree with Dirk. This sounds like cloaking. It would be best to only show Google the content that non-members can see.
If you show Google content that a non-member can't see, then this is cloaking and could get you penalized. But, even if it doesn't get you penalized, it's possible it could get you into Panda trouble. Let's say I am searching for something and I see a Google result that shows me that your site has the answer to my query. I click on your site and realize that I can only see this content if I'm a member. I don't want to become a member, so I click away and find another site to read. If enough users do this, then this is a signal to Google (and likely to Panda) that readers don't like your site.
-
Hi Darcy,
If you apply the strict definition of Google, you are "inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor" - even if you don't do it with the intention to trick search engines (the inserted text = text which is invisible for non-registered users).
Is there a way to show the same content to both bots & humans, and still keeping the page
- attractive enough for search engines
- teasing enough for humans to register
It's difficult to guess the level of risk you're running - but once penalised, traffic drop is huge & recovery takes normally a long time (with no guarantee of full recovery)
rgds
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the response. Folks out of Google do not see the full page that Google saw. They see a snippet of comments and a pitch to log in or register to see full comments (in a forum). They don't see different content right now... they see less content, but the same as Google saw. Is that clearer?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Darcy,
When people click on the results in Google - do they see the normal page (the one that Googlebot saw) or the version for the "new" users. If it's the second case - you are indeed cloaking according to Google's definition (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355).
If you're listed in Google News - you could participate in "First Click Free" (https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en) - which basically allows you to hide your content behind a registration wall but still be indexed as long as you provide at least 5 pages (articles) /day
Not all participants to First Click Free are playing according to the rules (http://searchengineland.com/google-fails-enforce-first-click-free-203078) - but I guess your site isn't the Financial times.
You could continue what you're doing now, but you certainly run the risk of a penalty in my opinion
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
User Intent - Office Chairs & Content Writing
Hi I'm trying to look for ideas for content on office chairs. Any ideas on where to start with user intent for this type of search query? I'm using answer the public to gather some ideas. Some are good ideas, but I can't actually find any search volume for the phrase so then I'm unsure whether to devote time to writing something. Surely most people want to just find a supplier, buy the chair & they don't want a huge informational piece how to buy a chair. Our competitors are the likes of amazon, and a load of other huge companies with high DA - so I'm looking at types of content we can write, people are interested in reading about chairs, which is less competitive..I'm not sure that exists... Any help is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Https & http urls in Google Index
Hi everyone, this question is a two parter: I am now working for a large website - over 500k monthly organic traffic. The site currently has both http and https urls in Google's index. The website has not formally converted to https. The https began with an error and has evolved unchecked over time. Both versions of the site (http & https) are registered in webmaster tools so I can clearly track and see that as time passes http indexation is decreasing and https has been increasing. The ratio is at about 3:1 in favor of https at this time. Traffic over the last year has slowly dipped, however, over the last two months there has been a steady decline in overall visits registered through analytics. No single page appears to be the culprit, this decline is occurring across most pages of the website, pages which traditionally draw heavy traffic - including the home page. Considering that Google is giving priority to https pages, could it be possible that the split is having a negative impact on traffic as rankings sway? Additionally, mobile activity for the site has steadily increased both from a traffic and a conversion standpoint. However that traffic has also dipped significantly over the last two months. Looking at Google's mobile usability error's page I see a significant number of errors (over 1k). I know Google has been testing and changing mobile ranking factors, is it safe to posit that this could be having an impact on mobile traffic? The traffic declines are 9-10% MOM. Thank you. ~Geo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geosem0 -
How Google organic search results differ in Local Searches?
We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ? For eg 1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rajeevEDU0 -
Google's Stance on "Hidden" Content
Hi, I'm aware Google doesn't care if you have helpful content you can hide/unhide by user interaction. I am also aware that Google frowns upon hiding content from the user for SEO purposes. We're not considering anything similar to this. The issue is, we will be displaying only a part of our content to the user at a time. We'll load 3 results on each page initially. These first 3 results are static, meaning on each initial page load/refresh, the same 3 results will display. However, we'll have a "Show Next 3" button which replaces the initial results with the next 3 results. This content will be preloaded in the source code so Google will know about it. I feel like Google shouldn't have an issue with this since we're allowing the user action to cycle through all results. But I'm curious, is it an issue that the user action does NOT allow them to see all results on the page at once? I am leaning towards no, this doesn't matter, but would like some input if possible. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Using both dofollow & nofollow links within the same blog site (but different post).
Hi all, I have been actively pursuing bloggers for my site in order to build page rank. My website sells women undergarments that are more on the exotic end. I noticed a large amount of prospective bloggers demand product samples. As already confirm, bloggers that are given "free" samples should use a rel=no follow attribute in their links. Unfortunately this does not build my page rank or transfer links juice. My question is this: is it advisable for them to also blog additional posts and include dofollow links? The idea is for the blogger to use a nofollow when posting about the sample and a regular link for a secondary post at a later time. What are you thoughts concerning this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
Google showing high volume of URLs blocked by robots.txt in in index-should we be concerned?
if we search site:domain.com vs www.domain.com, We see: 130,000 vs 15,000 results. When reviewing the site:domain.com results, we're finding that the majority of the URLs showing are blocked by robots.txt. They are subdomains that we use as production environments (and contain similar content as the rest of our site). And, we also find the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 541 already displayed." SEER Interactive mentions that this is one way to gauge a Panda penalty: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/100-panda-recovery-what-we-learned-to-identify-issues-get-your-traffic-back We were hit by Panda some time back--is this an issue we should address? Should we unblock the subdomains and add noindex, follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Www vs. non-www differences in crawl errors in Webmaster tools...
Hey All, I have been working on an eCommerce site for a while that to no avail, continues to make me want to hang myself. To make things worth the developers just do not understand SEO and it seems every change they make just messes up work we've already done. Job security I guess. Anywho,most recently we realized they had some major sitemap issues as almost 3000 pages were submitted by only 20 or so were indexed. Well, they updated the sitemap and although all the pages are properly indexing, I now have 5000+ "not found" crawl errors in the non-www version of WMT and almost none in the www version of the WMT account. Anyone have insight as to why this would be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin0 -
Page not showing up on Bing/Yahoo
We have a page that's ranking well on Google, however the page is not showing up in either Yahoo or Bing. What's even more odd is that for Y! and Bing, the page doesn't return in SERP even when you explicitly search for it (e.g. homepage + name of page). Instead, the result that gets returned is our homepage along with a Page Title that's been manipulated to include the keywords, but the title is not what we have in our title tag. Bing processed our sitemap today and I also manually submitted the URL, but it's still not turning up. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeLin0