Cloaking for better user experience and deeper indexing - grey or black?
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I'm working on a directory that has around 800 results (image rich results) in the top level view. This will likely grow over time so needs support thousands.
The main issue is that it is built in ajax so paginated pages are dynamically generated and look like duplicate content to search engines.
If we limit the results, then not all of the individual directory listing pages can be found.
I have an idea that serves users and search engines what they want but uses cloaking. Is it grey or black?
I've read http://moz.com/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful and none of the examples quite apply.
To allow users to browse through the results (without having a single page that has a slow load time) we include pagination links but which are not shown to search engines.
This is a positive user experience.
For search engines we display all results (since there is no limit the number of links so long as they are not spammy) on a single page.
This requires cloaking, but is ultimately serving the same content in slightly different ways.
1. Where on the scale of white to black is this?
2. Would you do this for a client's site?
3. Would you do it for your own site?
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I wish I could accurately place this on a scale for you. In my opinion I would consider this to be white hat. You have no intent of manipulating search results here - this is completely a usability issue and this is the obvious fix.
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Yes, I certainly would
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yes, I certainly would
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