undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
    Moz Pro

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

    Try it free!
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. 301 Redirect & Cloaking

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

301 Redirect & Cloaking

Technical SEO
5
7
3.7k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • Artience
    Artience last edited by Jul 15, 2011, 10:24 AM

    HEllo~~~~ People.

    I have a question regarding on cloaking.

    I will be really greatful if you can help me with question.

    I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries.

    So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries.

    e.g. www.example.com/us/

    www.example.com/de/

    www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on.

    Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries.

    Here is my question.

    I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com,

    my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect.

    In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking?

    Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • RyanKent
      RyanKent @Artience last edited by Jul 15, 2011, 12:10 PM Jul 15, 2011, 11:56 AM

      Artience Girl, the information shared by Shane, Aaron and Lewis is correct.

      Google wants to see the same page as it would be shown to a user under the same circumstances. If Google is crawling your page from San Jose California, then they want to see what a user from San Jose would see. If they decide to later crawl your site from their center in London, they want to see your site as it would be seen by a London user. The geo-targeting redirects you are presently doing are fine.

      If you were to write any code which says to always show the Google crawler the US version of your site, then that tactic would be defined as cloaking. Any time you write code to specifically identify a crawler and show it different content, then you are cloaking.

      It seems you are a bit uncomfortable with the answers so let me set you at ease by sharing a Matt Cutts response to your question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • Artience
        Artience @Jinx14678 last edited by Jul 15, 2011, 11:26 AM Jul 15, 2011, 11:26 AM

        Hi Shane Thomas.

        Thanks for your feedback.

        Actually contents is not exactly same, but alot similar. Because I sell different products for different countries.

        For example, I sell 30 products for US but only 10 products for UK. In this case, my UK site has only pages for 10 products. Of course, contents lay out and products are similar.

        In this case, should I worry about cloaking?

        Also, how search engine can see "intent is not deceptive or not"?

        I always wondering about that. ^^

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Artience
          Artience @CPU last edited by Jul 15, 2011, 11:19 AM Jul 15, 2011, 11:19 AM

          Hello, Lewis-SEO. Thanks for your reply, but I am not totally following your answer.

          What do you mean by "Google only version of the site"?

          You mentioned as follow.

          "You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL"

          Is this meaning that I should set "user agent redirection" for Google bot to send it to particular regional site? e.g. send Google bot to only www.example.com/us/ no matter which country IP address Google bot has?

          Please correct me, if I am wrong. But this sounds more cloacking to me.

          Google bot with DE IP address should redirect to www.example.com/de/ so google bot can crawl right contents. And when Google bot with UK IP addres should redirect to www.example.com/uk/.

          I think if I send alll Google bot to www.example.com/us/ for example, it will confuse google bot more.

          Could you please be more specific regarding your answer? PLEASE ~~~

          RyanKent 1 Reply Last reply Jul 15, 2011, 11:56 AM Reply Quote 0
          • CPU
            CPU last edited by Jul 15, 2011, 10:53 AM Jul 15, 2011, 10:53 AM

            Hi Artience Girl

            The Google Webmaster guidelines covers topics like these but a key point is that geotargetting using IP address is fine as long as you are not showing Google a separate Google only version of the site. This would be considered cloaking.

            You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL

            But before you do that check the Google Webmaster guidelines in and around this area as if you follow them you are less likely to end up on the wrong side of them.

            Hope this helps.

            Artience 1 Reply Last reply Jul 15, 2011, 11:19 AM Reply Quote 0
            • Jinx14678
              Jinx14678 last edited by Jul 15, 2011, 10:49 AM Jul 15, 2011, 10:43 AM

              This really does not fit the description of cloaking, the content is the same, just different languages right?

              If this is the case IMO this would not bee seen as cloaking as your are not delivering different content, just user experience.

              Also as long as you are not separating IP delivery by source (meaning sending spiders somewhere different than humans) this would not be the definition of cloaking.

              WIKI:

              One use of IP delivery is to determine the requestor's location, and deliver content specifically written for that country. This isn't necessarily cloaking. For instance, Google uses IP delivery for AdWords and AdSense advertising programs to target users in different geographic locations.

              As of 2006, many sites have taken up IP delivery to personalise content for their regular customers. Many of the top 1000 sites, including sites like Amazon (amazon.com), actively use IP delivery. None of these have been banned from search engines **as their intent is not deceptive.  **    Keyword here..... Deceptive  🙂

              Artience 1 Reply Last reply Jul 15, 2011, 11:26 AM Reply Quote 2
              • AaronSchinke
                AaronSchinke last edited by Jul 15, 2011, 10:34 AM Jul 15, 2011, 10:34 AM

                I don't think this would come across as cloaking at all. It's a fairly common practice.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                1 out of 7
                • First post
                  1/7
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • mollykathariner_ms

                  I have a question about the impact of a root domain redirect on site-wide redirects and slugs.

                  I have a question about the impact (if any) of site-wide redirects for DNS/hosting change purposes. I am preparing to redirect the domain for a site I manage from https://siteImanage.com to https://www.siteImanage.com. Traffic to the site currently redirects in reverse, from https://www.siteImanage.com to https://siteImanage.com. Based on my research, I understand that making this change should not affect the site’s excellent SEO as long as my canonical tags are updated and a 301 redirect is in place. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a potential consequence of this switch I’m not considering. Because this redirect lives at the root of all the site’s slugs and existing redirects, will it technically produce a redirect chain or a redirect loop? If it does, is that problematic? Thanks for your input!

                  Technical SEO | Jun 1, 2023, 7:33 AM | mollykathariner_ms
                  0
                • MarketHubb

                  Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.

                  I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
                  RewriteEngine On
                  RewriteBase /
                  Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?

                  Technical SEO | Jan 13, 2017, 4:00 PM | MarketHubb
                  1
                • Kilgray

                  Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect

                  We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks

                  Technical SEO | Mar 7, 2016, 2:13 PM | Kilgray
                  0
                • Jon-S

                  Product Variations (rel=canonical or 301) & Duplicate Product Descriptions

                  Hi All, Hoping for a bit of advice here please, I’ve been tasked with building an e-commerce store and all is going well so far. We decided to use Wordpress with Woocommerce as our shop plugin. I’ve been testing the CSV import option for uploading all our products and I’m a little concerned on two fronts: - Product Variations Duplicate content within the product descriptions **Product Variations: - ** We are selling furniture that has multiple variations (see list below) and as a result it creates c.50 product variations all with their own URL’s. Facing = Left, Right Leg style = Round, Straight, Queen Ann Leg colour = Black, White, Brown, Wood Matching cushion = Yes, No So my question is should I 301 re-direct the variation URL’s to the main product URL as from a user perspective they aren't used (we don't have images for each variation that would trigger the URL change, simply drop down options for the user to select the variation options) or should I add the rel canonical tag to each variation pointing back to the main product URL. **Duplicate Content: - ** We will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product.  Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content?  If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.

                  Technical SEO | Oct 22, 2015, 1:07 PM | Jon-S
                  0
                • Tintanus

                  Max Number of 301 Redirections?

                  Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.

                  Technical SEO | Jun 29, 2015, 7:01 AM | Tintanus
                  0
                • Veva

                  Can I remove 301 redirects after some time?

                  Hello, We have an very large number of 301 redirects on our site and would like to find a way to remove some of them. Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B? How about any links that go to A? Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time? Thank you for you you help!

                  Technical SEO | Oct 1, 2012, 5:16 PM | Veva
                  0
                • danatanseo

                  We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?

                  We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com  - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com  The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators  do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators  but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!

                  Technical SEO | Aug 14, 2012, 8:52 PM | danatanseo
                  0
                • craigycraig

                  301 Redirect "wildcard" question

                  I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.

                  Technical SEO | Dec 23, 2012, 6:28 PM | craigycraig
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.