What this site is doing? Does it look like cloaking to you?
-
Hi here,
I was studying our competitors SEO strategies, and I have noticed that one of our major competitors has setup something pretty weird from a SEO stand point for which I would like to know your thoughts about because I can't find a clear explanation for it.
Here is the deal: the site is musicnotes.com, and their product pages are located inside the /sheetmusic/ directory, so if you want to see all their product pages indexed on Google, you can just type in Google:
site:musicnotes.com inurl:/sheetmusic/
Then you will get about 290,000 indexed pages. No, here is the tricky part: try to click on one of those links, then you will get a 302 redirect to a page that includes a meta "noindex, nofollow" directive.
Isn't that pretty weird? Why would they want to "nonidex, nofollow" a page from a 302 redirect? And how in the heck the redirecting page is still in the index?!! And how Google can allow that?!
All this sounds weird to me and remind me spammy techniques of the 90s called "cloaking"... what do you think?
-
Sure I will! Thanks!
-
If you still need SEO and/or programming advice/work done after the summer let me know
-
Ok, nice to know.. we are always looking for passionate people that can work with us. Thanks!
-
At the moment I am very busy with a couple of projects. In general I do work as a SEO consultant.
Actually i'm a programmer, but down the line I started to fall in love with SEO and started to do that too. -
Yes, I'd like to know that tool.
A question: do you offer SEO consultation?
Thank you again Wesley.
-
Apperently Google keeps the original URL in the index as the source. It some ways it makes sense to do this.
It is still a pretty weird trick and I still don't know a good reason to do this. Would like to know if their are any consequences to this weird 'technique'. -
Thanks Wesley, that makes sense... but what's most weird to me is that Google keeps their pages in the index despite this trick... unless the 302 redirect allows legitimately that (maybe for a limited time)?
-
I don't think the word 'cloaking' is the right word since that is hiding content from users which you do want to present to the search engines. It is pretty weird though. A 302 should be a temporarily redirect and that they want to no-index the link it redirects to could make sense in some way.
If they are planning on changing the website then they could be temporarily redirecting the url's to new ones which they don't want to be indexed. When they have made the necessary changes they will remove the redirect and possibly the no-index pages.
Seems like a weird workaround but i've seen people thinking in weirder ways before.
It's more probably that they suffered from a panda or penguin update and that just like you they thought they could recover with a no-index (and a redirect?).Pretty weird story, curious to see if anyone else has some kind of explanation to why someone would set their site up like this.
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
-
How to build authority links and how they look ?
Hi how to build authority links and how they look ? If you could give a few examples so that i can see how it looks. and i have 9 linking root domains which is really low. so what are linking root domains ? and what i need to about that ? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek991 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Implications from portfolio site
I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio. The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably. The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little. What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered. This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages. Would you go for it and isolate anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Site wide links Concept
Hi All, All type of site wide links are bad for Google or it depends upon other factors as well? For example if you talk about GoDaddy or any other service provider company they put their links on the footer of other websites so in this condition, Google will harm their rankings or not? Also elaborate the best practices for site wide links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
Can DIVS that look like frames hurt?
We are working with a site that has what appears to be a frame in the middle but it is not targeting a new html page it is just a div hiding content until you use the scroll bar. What are best practices for working with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteoptimized0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
How Does This Site Rank So Well?!
So this website -> http://bailbondsripoffreport.com/ Ranks on the First Page for the term "Bail Bonds" It's the spammiest crappiest piece of junk website ever! lol - How does this site rank so well, it's not even a year old and it's link structure is crap. Can I like report them and have them removed lol. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utahseopros0