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
-
Internal link is creating duplicate content issues and generating 404s from website crawl.
Not sure what the best way to describe it but the site is built with Elementor page builder. We are finding out that a feature that is included with a pop modal window renders an HTML code as so: Click So when crawled I think the crawling is linking itself for some reason so the crawl returns something like this: xyz.com/builder/listing/ - what we want what we don't want xyz.com/builder/listing/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9//%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ so you'll notice how that string in the HREF is appended each time and it loops a couple times. Could I 301 this issue, what's the best way to go about handling something like this? It's causing duplicate meta descriptions/content errors for some listing pages we have. I did add a rel='nofollow' to the anchor tag with JavaScript but not sure if that'll help.
Technical SEO | | JoseG-LP0 -
Where and how much; Schema best practices.
Couple of schema questions: Should I 'only' mark up the contact page, as this has the most information? What about the header and footer, should I tag everything there also? If I do mark up the header, footer, and contact page, I end up with 3 "LocalBusiness" entries in Google testing tool, is that bad?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Https Duplicate Content
My previous host was using shared SSL, and my site was also working with https which I didn’t notice previously. Now I am moved to a new server, where I don’t have any SSL and my websites are not working with https version. Problem is that I have found Google have indexed one of my blog http://www.codefear.com with https version too. My blog traffic is continuously dropping I think due to these duplicate content. Now there are two results one with http version and another with https version. I searched over the internet and found 3 possible solutions. 1 No-Index https version
Technical SEO | | RaviAhuja
2 Use rel=canonical
3 Redirect https versions with 301 redirection Now I don’t know which solution is best for me as now https version is not working. One more thing I don’t know how to implement any of the solution. My blog is running on WordPress. Please help me to overcome from this problem, and after solving this duplicate issue, do I need Reconsideration request to Google. Thank you0 -
Sitemap and crawl impact
If I have two links in the sitemap (for example: page1.html and page2.html) but the web-site contains more pages (page1.html, page2.html and page3.html) is this a sign for Google to not to crawl other pages? I.e. Will Google index page3.html? Consider that any page can be accessed.
Technical SEO | | ditoroin0 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
Duplicate Page Content
I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
Mobile site: robots.txt best practices
If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0