SEO consequences for using IIS Rewrite rule to redirect to static content for crawlers only

Question

I have an AngularJS site that's pretty slow which is causing the SEO to be rather poor. Not to mention, the metadata doesn't render correctly.

To fix this, my thought was to use IIS rewrite rules to redirect to statically generated content (using Nuxt) if your user-agent is a known crawler.

So http://www.example.com/content-url becomes http://www.example.com/s/content-url. If for some reason a real user arrives on the page by accident, I can redirect them back to the actual content.

On a technical level, this is no problem. However, if there is a redirect, won't Google index the static content URL instead of the real url (desired) URL?

Is there any way to get around this? Or am I worried about nothing?

Answer 1

What you're planning to do is called Cloaking.

Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

The consequence will be a further hit to your rankings.

If your website uses elements which makes it harder for crawlers to crawl your website; Google provides some recommendations on what you can do.

You need to optimise your pages at a technical level. Use the <noscript> tags to serve the exact same content as what your JS will load. If your JS loads too slow; it will still help crawlers read the content on the page.