URL Masking or Cloaking?
-
Hi Guy's,
On our webshop we link from our menu to categories were we want to rank on in Google. Because the menu is sitewide i guess Google finds the categories in the menu important and meaby let them score better (onside links)
The problem that i'm facing with is that we make difference in Gender. In the menu we have: Man and Woman. Links from the menu go to: /categorie?gender=1/ and /category?gender=2/. But we don't want to score on gender but on the default URL.
For example:
- Focus keyword = Shoes
- Menu Man link: /shoes?gender=1
- Menu Woman link: /shoes?gender=2
But we only want to rank on /shoes/. But that URL is not placed in the menu. Every URL with: "?" has a follow noindex.
So i was thinking to make a link in the menu, on man and woman: /shoes/, but on mouse down (program it that way) ?=gender. Is this cloaking for Google?
What we also could do is make a canonical to the /shoes/ page. But i don't know if we get intern linking value on ?gender pages that have a canonical.
Hope it makes senses
Advises are also welcome, such as: Place al the default URL's in the footer.
-
That's true, they append parameters tracking where you came from, which looks like it can affect the navigation you're seeing on the left. They're making sure that Google doesn't get confused by using a canonical on their pages, like Mike, Eric and I have recommended.
-
This website is doing the same:
On the left filters... When you hover over a link it's different from the actual URL when visiting it.
-
Hi there,
Like Mike and Eric have said, I'd recommend using a canonical tag on the men's and women's pages to the version of the page that shows both genders' shoes/clothing.
That said, I just want to make sure this is the best path for your site. If it makes more sense for your site to point people to shoes and clothing by gender, shouldn't that be what you show in Google's search results? I'm a woman, and generally search for "women's shoes" since otherwise I often end up on pages that show men's options.
Let us know if these solutions work!
Kristina
-
So to clarify when you say "menu" are you talking about faceted navigation or are you talking about actual page navigation (near header/footer)? If it's faceted, then you should canonical back to the main page so you're not competing with other pages on your site (/mens-shoes or /womens-shoes). If you canonical the men's or women's page back to the main /shoes/ page then you will lose the benefit of those pages.
Does the site only work off of parameters, or do you have separate pages for different genders?
-
You might be better served by using a canonical to point the parameters to the base page. I.E. /shoes?gender=1 with a rel="canonical" pointing at "/shoes". Depends on the variety of the content of the pages, if you're cannibalizing your own keywords, etc.
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
-
URL masking
Hi all, Within my organization we maintain a bunch of websites, say child1.com, child2.com and child3.com. It was recently suggested that we merge all three into a single one, say mother.com. The marketing community within my organization strongly argued against this, mainly due to risks related to brand awareness, rank and traffic loss for each of these websites. But we resigned to the idea that we must do it, so we started considering the next proper steps. Now, my understanding is that setting up redirects is crucial in order to cushion the fall and mitigate the losses. However, some people are suggesting url masking. To me personally, url masking doesn't sound like a white hat practice, maybe it's borderline grey, but the bottom line is I need some advice on this topic. Could someone kindly address the following: 1. How is url masking different from url redirect? 2. Is url masking different from url cloaking? 3. Would google penalize us for implementing url masking? 4. Would that have any impact on our PPC campaigns? 5. Are there any documented cases of successful and google-sanctioned websites that are actively using url masking? 6. Are there any pitfalls to using this strategy? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SimonaCretu0 -
How to improve PA of Shortened URLs
Why some of shortened urls like bitly/owly/googl has PA>40? I tried everything to improve PA of my shortened urls like facebook shares, retweets and backlinks to them but still i have PA-1. Checkout this URL: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/state-of-links in MOZ OSE and you will many 301 links from shortners
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | igains
I asked many seo experts about this but no one answered this question so today subscribed MOZ pro for the solution. Please give me the answer.0 -
Best URL structure for SEO for Malaysian/Singapore site on .com.au domain
Hi there I know ideally i need a .my or .sg domain, however i dont have time to do this in the interim so what would be the best way to host Malaysian content on a www.domainname.com.au website? www.domainname.com.au/en-MY
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
www.domainname.com.au/MY
domainname.com.au/malaysia
malaysia.domainname.com.au
my.domainname.com.au Im assuming this cant make the .com.au site look spammy but thought I'd ask just to be safe? Thanks in advance! 🙂0 -
URL structure: 301 redirect or leave as is?
Hello, My website, www.coloringbookfun.com is very old and authoritative, but the URL structure is terrible. If you check out some of our subcategories such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda and individual printables such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda/imagepages/image2.html You can see that they aren't optimized. I am curious to know the pros and cons of fixing the URL structure and 301ing them to the new optimized url. Will 301ing lose authority and backlinks for the sites pages? Does optimizing the url structure outweigh losing the authority/backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Why do websites use different URLS for mobile and desktop
Although Google and Bing have recommended that the same URL be used for serving desktop and mobile websites, portals like airbnb are using different URLS to serve mobile and web users. Does anyone know why this is being done even though it is not GOOD for SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | razasaeed0 -
Is there such thing as white hat cloaking?
We are near the end of a site redesign and come to find out its in javascript and not engine friendly. Our IT teams fix to this is show crawlable content to googlebot and others through the user agents. I told them this is cloaking and I'm not comfortable with this. They said after doing research, if the content is pretty much the same, it is an acceptable way to cloak. About 90% of the content will be the same between the "regular user" and content served to googlebot. Does anyone have any experience with this, are there any recent articles or any best practices on this? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CHECOM0 -
Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RUNNERagency0 -
Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RUNNERagency0