301'ing googlebot
-
I have a client that has been 301’ing googlebot to the canonical page. This is because they have a cart_id and session parameters in urls. This is mainly from when googlebot comes in on a link that has these parameters in the URL, as they don’t serve these parameters up to googlebot at all once it starts to crawl the site.
I am worried about cloaking; I wanted to know if anyone has any info on this.
I know that Google have said that doing anything where you detect goolgebots useragent and treat them different is a problem.
Anybody had any experience on this, I would be glad to hear. -
Hello Alan,
If they are only doing this for Google then it is indeed cloaking, regardless of their intent. That may or may not land them in hot water, but I think Google has provided plenty of other ways to handle this situation.
First and foremost, it would be best if those session IDs and certain other parameters were put into a cookie instead of the URL.
As you probably know, you can tell Google and Bing how to handle the different parameters with their free webmaster tools so it would seem to me like that would be the best approach if you cannot get rid of the parameters all-together.
You can also put a rel canonical tag in the header that references the version of the URL without the parameters.
Force redirecting Googlebot is not a good idea. If, for instance, you wanted to force redirect by IP - as is the case with many global sites that have geo-specific landing pages - then that would be fine as long as you aren't making any special exceptions for Googlebot.
Did this answer your question?
Good luck!
Everett
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
301 Redirecting http to https
In the Moz Site Crawl issue, I was seeing an error that said we were temporarily redirecting our homepage to https URLs. So I changed the code in htaccess to make it 301 redirect but I'm still getting the same error. I implemented it last week and we just had a new crawl yesterday. Here is the new code: RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | Heydarian
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^heritagelawmarketing.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.heritagelawmarketing.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC] Does anyone know why I'm still getting 302 redirects? Thanks0 -
Will a Robots.txt 'disallow' of a directory, keep Google from seeing 301 redirects for pages/files within the directory?
Hi- I have a client that had thousands of dynamic php pages indexed by Google that shouldn't have been. He has since blocked these php pages via robots.txt disallow. Unfortunately, many of those php pages were linked to by high quality sites mulitiple times (instead of the static urls) before he put up the php 'disallow'. If we create 301 redirects for some of these php URLs that area still showing high value backlinks and send them to the correct static URLs, will Google even see these 301 redirects and pass link value to the proper static URLs? Or will the robots.txt keep Google away and we lose all these high quality backlinks? I guess the same question applies if we use the canonical tag instead of the 301. Will the robots.txt keep Google from seeing the canonical tags on the php pages? Thanks very much, V
Technical SEO | | Voodak0 -
301 redirect question
Hi Everyone When doing 301 redirects for a large site, if a page has 0 inbound links would you still redirect it or just leave it? Im just curious on the best practice for this Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
260k 301 redirects
Hello, I just found that some of the urls on my site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - ) After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed. If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers to the new location. The content will not change. My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day? what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap? thanks
Technical SEO | | mylittlepwny0 -
Are these 'not found' errors a concern?
Our webmaster report is showing thousands of 'not found' errors for links that show up in javascript code. Is this something we should be concerned about? Especially since there are so many?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
301 redirect or 302
A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
301 & backlinks
Apologies if my question sounds like a school Maths lesson 😉 If you have 2 sites: Site 1) is linked to by sites A,B & C Site 2) is linked to by sites X,Y & Z You then 301 redirect site 2 to site 1. Most of the juice from site 2 (obtained from links X,Y,Z) should be passed over to site 1. But what if site 2 is linked to by the same sites A,B,C as site 1 instead of X,Y,Z. Since both sites have exactly the same links will the same, less, or any weight be passed over by the 301 redirect? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | martyc1 -
How much javascript does Googlebot read
We have a site where we have certain navigational links solely for the human user. These links help the user experience and lead to pages that we don't need crawled by googlebot. We have these links in javascript so if you disable javascript these links are invisible. Will these links be considered cloaking even though our intention is not to cloak but save our Google crawl for pages we do want indexed?
Technical SEO | | CruiseControl0