Questions tagged [cloaking]
The act of serving different content to different website visitors, particularly when serving different content to search engine bots than normal website users.
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Is it possible to use a template for search spiders?
Is it possible to use a special template for search engines and another template for visitors? on the WordPress platform.
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Can randomly generated web page content lead to search engine penalties?
I have specialized pages with random content. Every time they are accessed or refreshed, different content is displayed.
I have pages that contain randomly selected users of my website:
I have pages ...
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If I hide some scripts from Google bot, will it be considered as cloaking?
I have a website built with Gatsby.js. After building it, I receive a lot of static HTML files, with React app bound to them. All content is in HTML already, JS is needed for some fancy transitions, ...
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Obscuring sub-domain
I have a site that is for a realtor and its URL is say, homesforsale.example but the actual listings are housed within an MLS/IDX system that is currently set to search.homesforsale.example. The ...
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Can I hide ads for Googlebot so it loads my site faster?
We have ads which load sometimes slower, We want to hide those ads for Googlebot. We plan to hide that ad code for googlebot only and show them only to users.
Do we risk a Google penalty if we hide ...
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How to specify paywall contents for multiple pages
I am reading this guide to apply paywall contents to my website so that Google knows I am not cloaking. Unless I have misunderstood something, the example in that guide only deals with 1 particular ...
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Cloaking risk for load balanced Drupal site where new content may take a while to get to all servers
I want to use Load Balancer(2 nodes) for one my Drupal site. That means editor can't edit the site since edits will go to any node. Secondly comments can also be saved in either node.
Even if we edit ...
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SEO How To Handle Pages That Require Login & Payment?
If you have URLs on your site that require a login but a user who is not logged in tries to access those login required URLs, how do you handle it? 401, 403, 404, 301 to a login page?
If the page ...
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Is server side rendering without any styling acceptable for a single page application (that is heavily styled) in order to satisfy most search bots?
Let's say that you have a big / heavy single page application (SPA) that can be represented statically in 100,000+ pages.
Will it be acceptable to have a back-end that dynamically generates pages ...
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SEO cloaking rules when deferring loading content only after user interacting
what are the rules with google (or any other search engine) in regards to cloaking (e.g. showing different content for bots vs real users)
The question is what if we want to load certain content only ...
CommunityBot
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Will I get penalized by Google for cloaking if I redirect mobile users to a sub domain?
I have a website https://example.com which is responsive but it came a time where it displays too much text. So I decided to create a progressive web application version and would like to deploy it ...
CommunityBot
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Hide a privacy policy banner from GoogleBot
I want to hide a privacy policy banner from Google. A similar question has been asked over here however a lot has changed since then. In our case, we have been advised by our lawyers to ensure that ...
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For cloaking, what is the difference between the two examples Google gives: changes based on user agent, and text instead of flash to bots?
In that Google documentation about cloaking it is explained that cloaking could be either:
Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of
images or Flash to users
...
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Serving static HTML pages generated using Rendertron - Is it considered cloaking?
Preamble
Hello,
I'm trying to improve SEO of a web app built with Angular 7.
Unfortunately, I can't (not allowed to) install node on the server it's being hosted on, so I cannot implement server-...
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Is search engine cloaking caused by JavaScript changing the document object model?
This current article from Wikipedia defines Cloaking as:
Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the
content presented to the search engine spider is different from that
...
- 97.2k
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Would using mouse movement to change how the page is rendered be considered "cloaking" to Google?
My site can enhance itself to client side rendered (CSR) (ish) if a prediction can be made by mouse movement analysis. It can gauge a visitor's familiarity with the site, confusion, etc. The content ...
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Is this site cloaking to hide my backlink from spiders?
I wrote a guest post at the following URL:
https://wparena.com/integrate-google-tag-manager-wordpress/
At the end, you can see my author box with a URL pointing back to my site. This link is a ...
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Will disabling javascript be considered as cloaking by Google
There is a site with dynamic content generation (angular). Google is not indexing it well. But it is indexed well with static pages (same content). Static pages are not fast because of page reloading ...
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Can I disallow JS scripts in robots.txt for Googlebot if the website degrades to offer equivelant non-JS functionality?
To my knowledge, Googlebot is currently fully capable of rendering complex SPA applications, and this is recommended as a rule of thumb.
The website is currently routed from server side and served as ...
CommunityBot
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isAccessibleForFree and cloaking
I need an advice regarding isAccessibleForFree and cloaking.
I'm running a subscription based news website which has standard free to view teaser (short description) and the full article.
When user ...
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Could changing the download link and screenshots based on user agent be considered cloaking?
I sell a software product.
I currently detect if the user agent identifies itself as Mac somehow. if so, the server generates the landing page, so its default download link is for Mac and shows a ...
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Does text-shadow CSS affect SEO ranking by risking a cloaking penalty?
I've done googling this but didn't found any answers and would love to try this out on my website.
As it's a good ranking website, I want to ask you before risking it.
font-size: 50px;
...
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Is it cloaking to hide a <canvas> and display a message for mobile browsers?
I have a simple website with a single page containing a canvas element that is rendering a video game.
I have a script on this page that hides the canvas element and displays a special message when ...
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Does an age confirmation overlay screen on the landing page for a porn site negatively effect SEO?
I am creating a porn website for my client. Now because of UK laws, we need to have an enter page that confirms that the user is over 18 years old.
Now I've had a look at competitors and they are ...
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Personalized content for users who came from Google SERPs: cloaking?
Imagine that there is a video site like youtube, it uses personalized content for users based on their Geo, referring site data, cookies and similar. On certain pages different users might see ...
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seo implication of taking user to some other link rather than href given on anchor through javascript
I have the following URLs on a page:
<a class="mylink" href="http://www.example.com/old-product1" />
<a class="mylink" href="http://www.example.com/old-product2" />
<a class="mylink" ...
- 21.6k
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Eliminating need to create near-duplicate content
Ever since I included the tutorial feature on my site, my adsense income consistently went to the bottom every day since the feature was added.
Now I feel the only way I can make money again is to ...
CommunityBot
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Is it considered blackhat to show structured data to search engine bots but not humans?
Is it considered blackhat if the JSON-LD structured data is only shown to search engines? The content is still present on the web-site for users, but it's only marked up as structured data when we ...
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How to hide product prices from search engines when they vary by country?
We have a site which sells items online only for US customers. The site checks the location based on IP and decides if the price should appear on not. Customers from other locations can buy the ...
CommunityBot
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Can I "cloak" for crawlers and not use session id parameters and redirects to check for cookies?
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 ...
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Could using SEO title and SEO excerpt be considered a form of cloaking?
The SEO title and excerpt might be written in different verbiage than the article. Then, the user looking up a particular word or word group might not see that word or word group in the article.
Is ...
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Is it considered cloaking if I show different content to users depending on wether or not the pageview was a "landing"?
If a user comes to my website from an external source, the page they landed on will be modified to include all the "landing page tips and tricks that increase conversion," plus a small message pops up ...
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Path Forwarding with cloaking or masking [closed]
I have recently developed a website that allows users to have a sub-domain creation of our online store: www.USERNAME.example.com
I need to offer the user the ability to have their own complete ...
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Hide joyride (intro javascript) for Googlebot
I am using a joyride script for new visitors.
Example here:
http://foundation.zurb.com/sites/docs/v/5.5.3/components/joyride.html
After the vistior is done with the intro, a cookie will be created ...
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How bad is cloaking for my site's search engine rankings?
My website is very JavaScript-heavy. All the content of the site is loaded asynchronously using JavaScript.
So my developers implemented cloaking - server sends a static version of the webpage if it's ...
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Domain cloak and redirect shows just the root domain everywhere?
I'm putting up my first website using AlterVista as a hosting.
I have bought a second level domain from them with redirect and I am trying to set it right.
normally my page would use http://[...
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Can my single page application deliver an HTML snapshot to search engines?
I’ve SPA (Single Page Application) project that works 100% using AngularJS, with all of it’s content dynamically generated through JavaScript on the client side! As you know this means no crawlability,...
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Could Google detect Cloaking if I displayed content to Google user agent using PHP
PHP is server side and all Googlebot would see is the output HTML, right?
if (strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’],"Googlebot")) { // do some functionality }
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Implications of SEO for single page websites
I built a server application that handles bot requests for my website, which was built using AngularJS. It works great, but I'm not entirely sure if it's valid in terms of Google's policy for SEO.
...
CommunityBot
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displaying first few pages of a pdf on a page = duplicate content?
I am embedding scribd PDFs on my website. These are exam papers PDF which are available on other websites.
As it is scribd is an embed/iframe, I think Google considers my page as being empty with no ...
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Is limiting the page views from users but allowing Googlebot unlimited access considered cloaking?
Domaintools when accessing Whois info like this: http://whois.domaintools.com/google.com gives error once free account reaches 20 or so lookups. It then does not return a HTTP 200.
But Google it ...
CommunityBot
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Does changing phone numbers in content just for bots qualify as cloaking?
I'm a small business owner (I run a little computer repair shop), and I'm attempting to track calls to my store from different advertising channels. I use three separate tracking phone numbers: one ...
CommunityBot
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Is using Progressive enhancement, overriding links with .js considered cloaking and can it be see by search engines?
I'm using .load to load content from a page /about.html, so that search engines can see what is going on. I've made the links that trigger the .load <a> tags to the page /about.html but for ...
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Could AJAX + caching be seen as cloaking?
I have a website where we use a technique to speed up loading times based on a combination of AJAX + caching. Basically, when we have a section in a page with content which is slow to retrieve, we ...
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SEO implications of blocking users viewing more than X pages
I'm considering the option to block non-premium users after viewing more than X pages. This basically means blocking the content after a fixed amount of pageviews per session.
I can either:
Keep ...
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SEO + ViewState = to the bottom for crawlers only? Is it cloaking?
I have some large controls that are swelling my ViewState to 10KB+. Ignoring the discussion about using alternatives to ViewState, I'm trying to minimize any impact my ViewState might have on SEO. ...
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953
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Hide <noscript> contents from google and other search engines
I've got some content wrapped into <noscript> tag which I don't want google and any other search engines to see, is there a way to hide it?
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Menu hidden links and bots!
I want to make a menu with a list with hidden links and when the user points the menu with he mouse the links will appear, my problem is that the bots may think this as a deceiving tactic and lower my ...
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Disable outbound links without letting others know that
Is there a way I can tell google not to follow external links ( pointing to other sites) without letting other know.
I know you can disable outbound links by putting rel=nofollow or something in ...
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Is offering Google Bot a lite version of site skin considered cloaking?
If you have multiple templates a user can choose from on a site (like a forum), and you offer Google Bot a "lite" skin, is this considered cloaking? Or is this considered okay?
The actual content ...
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