Cloaking? Best Practices Crawling Content Behind Login Box
-
Hi-
I'm helping out a client, who publishes sale information (fashion sales etc.)
In order for the client to view the sale details (date, percentage off etc.) they need to register for the site.
If I allow google bot to crawl the content, (identify the user agent) but serve up a registration light box to anyone who isn't google would this be considered cloaking?
Does anyone know what the best practice for this is? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Nopadon
-
Can I say I admire your inventiveness?
You go to some lengths to not register and really, apart from the majority of people not knowing how to do a reverse image search, probably reflects people's attitude to those sorts of lightbox registration forms.
-
I'm going to respond from a human point of view and not a technical point of view.
I've been searching for houses recently on Craigslist. There are a couple of real estate agents who post ads on CL with a link to their site. When you click the link, you get a lightbox requiring that you fill out the lead form to be able to see the details of the house. I do one of two things:
-
I open up IE in private browsing mode and paste in the URL. The private browsing mode has something that prevents this script from running and I can see the house details just fine.
-
If the house address is not provided in the CL ad, I'll copy the image URL of one of the CL photos and put that into a Google reverse image search. I'll find a different website that has posted the same house and use their site that doesn't require me to register. (I realize this may not happen in your scenario above).
I agree what the other people say about not wanting provide one thing to Google and another to users, and wanted to add that people will try to find ways around the registration. I don't have a solution for you, sadly.
-
-
Heya there,
Thanks for asking your question here
My first point would be that human visitors don't like to be given forms when they first visit a site, so would suggest you don't do this.
My alternative strategy would be to provide a home page of good content talking about the data etc that is available on your site and then provide a button for people to register if they want to.
Don't detect the user agent and provide alternative content as, however good your intentions are, that could be considered cloaking. Google is against you providing Google different content to humans, so don't do it.
Do things differently
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
-
Glossary Page - best practice
Hi guys, We have a glossary on our website. All terms are accessible via a 'view all' URL, however we also have each letter on their own URL, e.g /a. Currently the rel=canonical tag for all the individual letter pages points to the view all URL. I'm just wondering whether that is best practice or not, as currently not all the individual letter pages are being indexed. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | brian-madden0 -
What are some best practices for optimizing alternate versions of a brand name?
What are the best methods for ensuring that the correct spelling/formatting of a brand name rank in the SERP when an alternate formatting/spelling of the brand name is searched. Take for example the brand name (made up for example purposes), "SuperFry". Many customers search using the term "Super Fry" (with a space). To make things worse, not only does Google not return the brand name SuperFry, but it also auto corrects to another brand name "Super-Fri". Is there a common best practice to ensure the customer finds the intended brand name when they simply add a space in the search term? I assume a quick fix would be to create an ad words campaign for the alternate spellings/formatting. What about an organic solution? Perhaps we could create a special page talking about the alternate ways to spell the brand name? Would this solution send mixed signals to Google and potential hurt the over all rankings? Thanks much for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Vspeed0 -
Google inconsistent in display of meta content vs page content?
Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content. We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently. So my question... Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?
Technical SEO | | websurfer0 -
Site maintenance and crawling
Hey all, Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime. We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops. My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index). I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?
Technical SEO | | Daylan1 -
Linking to unrelated content
Hi, Just wanted to know, linking to unrelated content will harm the site? I know linking to unrelated content is not good. But wanted to know weather any chances are there or not. I have a site related to health and the other one related to technology. The technology site is too good having PR 6 and very good strong backlinks. And the health related site has very much tough competition, So i wanted to know may be i could link this health site to technology site to get good link from it. Can you suggest me about it. waiting for your replies...
Technical SEO | | Dexter22387874870 -
Noindex all dodgy content?
Hello should I be brutal with noindex? should I noindex anything of no value to websurfers? from my understanding, nofollow is different to to noindex? Google follows through the site crawling and discovering subpages but will not put the noindexed page in serps. Is that right? I have subcategory pages in a business directory site, these pages just have links to there subpages.
Technical SEO | | adamzski1 -
Backlinks to unique login pages
Hi There, This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help! The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform. For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with. Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields. So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this? Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL? Thanks in advance! Henry
Technical SEO | | hnydnn0 -
Solution for duplicate content not working
I'm getting a duplicate content error for: http://www.website.com http://www.website.com/default.htm I searched for the Q&A for the solution and found: Access the.htaccess file and add this line: redirect 301 /default.htm http://www.website.com I added the redirect to my .htaccess and then got the following error from Google when trying to access the http://www.website.com/default.htm page: "This webpage has a redirect loop
Technical SEO | | Joeuspe
The webpage at http://www.webpage.com/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer." "Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects." How can I correct this? Thanks0