Can I "cloak" for crawlers and not use session id parameters and redirects to check for cookies?

Question

I track my users using GET parameters to be able to do it even if they don't allow the use of cookies. And to do that, I need to do 2 redirections the first time the user hits my page.

I am having some problems (Googlebot requires 19 redirections) and found that you cannot use Session ID for crawlers in the GET parameters so, they recommend to detect if the user is a robot and, in this case, do not redirect and do not use any Session ID.

I can do it perfectly fine but... wouldn't Google detect the redirection is made for humans and not for Googlebot? And if they do, wouldn't that count as cloaking?

What should I do?

Answer 1

"Cloaking" in this situation would be fine. When the user agent contains bot|crawl|slurp|spider you should not use session id parameters or check for cookies. You are delivering the same content to users and bots. Google won't have a problem with this particular cloak.

I use a similar technique for deciding whether or not to use Data URI for the images on my site. I treat all bots the same as IE 7 and earlier which cannot handle Data URIs. Technically it is cloaking, but all bots get the same data and would render the same pixels on the screen as users. They just get that data through different technical means.

It might also be worth exploring different ways of handling the issue. If it were my site I might set cookies, and then use JavaScript like this on the links: onclick="if(!document.cookie.indexOf('session')this.href+='?session=abcdef1234';" Googlebot doesn't execute the onclick when following links, so it would still be able to crawl your site without parameters.

When you are using session parameters, you should log into Google Search Console and tell Google to ignore them. Open the URL Parameters Tool or view the crawl parameters documenation. You will want to add your session parameter and set it to "Doesn't effect page content (ex. tracks usage)".