Captcha wall to access content and cloaking sanction

[clementjaunault]

Hello, to protect our website against scrapping, visitor are redirect to a recaptcha page after 2 pages visited.

But for a SEO purpose Google bot is not included in that restriction so it could be seen as cloaking.

What is the best practice in SEO to avoid a penalty for cloaking in that case ?
I think about adding a paywall Json shema NewsArticle but the content is acceccible for free so it's not a paywall but more a captcha protection wall.

What do you recommend ?
Thanks,

Describe your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer.

[willcritchlow]

In general, Google cares only about cloaking in the sense of treating their crawler differently to human visitors - it's not a problem to treat them differently to other crawlers.

So: if you are tracking the "2 pages visited" using cookies (which I assume you must be? there is no other reliable way to know the 2nd request is from the same user without cookies?) then you can treat googlebot exactly the same as human users - every request is stateless (without cookies) and so googlebot will be able to crawl. You can then treat non-googlebot scrapers more strictly, and rate limit / throttle / deny them as you wish.

I think that if real human users get at least one "free" visit, then you are probably OK - but you may want to consider not showing the recaptcha to real human users coming from google (but you could find yourself in an arms race with the scrapers pretending to be human visitors from google).

In general, I would expect that if it's a recaptcha ("prove you are human") step rather than a paywall / registration wall, you will likely be OK in the situation where:

1. Googlebot is never shown the recaptcha
2. Other scrapers are aggressively blocked
3. Human visitors get at least one page without a recaptcha wall
4. Human visitors can visit more pages after completing a recaptcha (but without paying / registering)

Hope that all helps. Good luck!

[effectdigital]

Well I'm not saying that there's no risk in what you are doing, just that I perceive the risk to be less risky than the alternatives. I think such a fundamental change like pay-walling  could be moderately to highly likely to have a high impact on results (maybe a 65% likelihood of a 50% impact). Being incorrectly accused of cloaking would be a much lower chance (IMO) but with potentially higher impact (maybe a 5% or less chance of an 85% impact). When weighing these two things up, I subjectively conclude that I'd rather make the cloaking less 'cloaky' in and way I could, and leave everything outside of a paywall. That's how I'd personally weigh it up

Personally I'd treat Google as a paid user. If you DID have a 'full' paywall, this would be really sketchy but since it's only partial and indeed data can continue to be accessed for FREE via recaptcha entry, that's the one I'd go for

Again I'm not saying there is no risk, just that each set of dice you have at your disposal are ... not great? And this is the set of dice I'd personally choose to roll with

The only thing to keep in mind is that, the algorithms which Googlebot return data to are pretty smart. But they're not human smart, a quirk in an algo could cause a big problem. Really though, the chances of that IMO (if all you have said is accurate) are minimal. It's the lesser of two evils from my current perspective

[clementjaunault]

Yes our DA is good and we got lot of gouv, edu and medias backlinks.

Paid user did not go through recaptcha, indeed treat Google as a paid user could be a good solution.

So you did not recommend using a paywall ?

Today recaptcha is only used for decision pages
But we need thoses pages to be indexed for our business because all or our paid user find  us while searching a justice decision on Google.

So we have 2 solutions :

• Change nothing and treat Google as a paid user
• Use hard paywall and inform Google that we use json shema markup but we risk to seen lot of page deindexed

In addition we could go from 2 pages visited then captcha to something less intrusive like 6 pages then captcha
Also in the captcha page there is also a form to start a free trial, so visitor can check captcha and keep navigate or create a free account and get an unlimited access for 7 days.

To conclude, if I well understand your opinion, we don't have to stress about being penalized for cloaking because Gbot is smart and understand why we use captcha and our DA help us being trustable by gbot. So I think the best solution is the 1,  Change nothing and treat Google as a paid user.

Thank a lot for your time and your help !
It's a complicated subject and it's hard to find people able to answer my question, but you did it

[effectdigital]

Well if you have a partnership with the Court of Justice I'd assume your trust and authority metrics would be pretty high with them linking to you on occasion. If that is true then I think in this instance Google would give you the benefit of the doubt, as you're not just some random tech start-up (maybe a start-up, but one which matters and is trusted)

It makes sense that in your scenario your data protection has to be iron-clad. Do paid users have to go through the recaptcha? If they don't, would there be a way to treat Google as a paid user rather than a free user?

Yeah putting down a hard paywall could have significant consequences for you. Some huge publishers manage to still get indexed (pay-walled news sites), but not many and their performance deteriorates over time IMO

Here's a question for you. So you have some pages you really want indexed, and you have a load of data you don't want scraped or taken / stolen - right? Is it possible to ONLY apply the recaptcha for the pages which contain the data that you don't want stolen, and never trigger the recaptcha (at all) in other areas? Just trying to think if there is a wiggle way in the middle, to make it obvious to Google you are doing all you possibly can to do keep Google's view and the user view the same

[clementjaunault]

Hi effectdigital, thanks a lot for that answer. I agreed with you captcha is not the best UX idea but our content is sensitive, we are a legal tech indexing french justice decision. We get unique partnership with Court of Justice because we got a unique technology to anonymize data in justice decision  so we don't want our competitor to scrap our date (and trust me they try, every day..). This is why we use recaptcha protection. For Gbot we use Google reverse DNS and user agent so even a great scrapper can't bypass our security.

Then we have a paid option, people can create an account and paid a monthly subscription to access content in unlimited. This is why I think about paywall. We could replace captcha page by a paywall page (with a freetrial of course) but I'm not sur Google will index millions of page hiding behing a metered paywall

As you said, I think there is no good answer..
And again, thank a lot to having take time to answer my question

[effectdigital]

Unless you have previously experienced heavy scraping which you cannot solve any other way, this seems a little excessive. Most websites don't have such strong anti-spam measures and they cope just fine without them

I would say that it would be better to embed the recaptcha on the page and just block users from proceeding further (or accessing the content), until the recaptcha were filled. Unfortunately this would be a bad solution as scrapers would still be able to scrape the page, so I guess redirecting to the captcha is your only option. Remember that if you are letting Googlebot through (probably with a user agent toggle) then as long as scrape-builders program their scripts to serve the Googlebot UA, they can penetrate your recaptcha redirects and just refuse to do them.  Even users can alter their browser's UA to avoid the redirects

There are a number of situations where Google don't consider redirect penetration to be cloaking. One big one is regional redirects, as Google needs to crawl a whole multilingual site instead of being redirected. I would think that in this situation Google wouldn't take too much of an issue with what you are doing, but you can never be certain (algorithms work in weird and wonderful ways)

I don't think any schema can really help you. Google will want to know that you are using technology that could annoy users so they can lower your UX score(s) accordingly, but unfortunately letting them see this will stop your site being properly crawled so I don't know what the right answer is. Surely there must be some less nuclear, obstructive technology you could integrate instead? Or just keep on top of your block lists (IP ranges, user agents) and monitor your site (don't make users suffer)

If you are already letting Googlebot through your redirects, why not just have a user-agent based allow list instead of a black list which is harder to manage? Find the UAs of most common mobile / desktop browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Opera, whatever) and allow those UAs plus Googlebot. Anyone who does penetrate for scraping, deal with them on a case-by-case basis