What this site is doing? Does it look like cloaking to you?
-
Hi here,
I was studying our competitors SEO strategies, and I have noticed that one of our major competitors has setup something pretty weird from a SEO stand point for which I would like to know your thoughts about because I can't find a clear explanation for it.
Here is the deal: the site is musicnotes.com, and their product pages are located inside the /sheetmusic/ directory, so if you want to see all their product pages indexed on Google, you can just type in Google:
site:musicnotes.com inurl:/sheetmusic/
Then you will get about 290,000 indexed pages. No, here is the tricky part: try to click on one of those links, then you will get a 302 redirect to a page that includes a meta "noindex, nofollow" directive.
Isn't that pretty weird? Why would they want to "nonidex, nofollow" a page from a 302 redirect? And how in the heck the redirecting page is still in the index?!! And how Google can allow that?!
All this sounds weird to me and remind me spammy techniques of the 90s called "cloaking"... what do you think?
-
Sure I will! Thanks!
-
If you still need SEO and/or programming advice/work done after the summer let me know
-
Ok, nice to know.. we are always looking for passionate people that can work with us. Thanks!
-
At the moment I am very busy with a couple of projects. In general I do work as a SEO consultant.
Actually i'm a programmer, but down the line I started to fall in love with SEO and started to do that too. -
Yes, I'd like to know that tool.
A question: do you offer SEO consultation?
Thank you again Wesley.
-
Apperently Google keeps the original URL in the index as the source. It some ways it makes sense to do this.
It is still a pretty weird trick and I still don't know a good reason to do this. Would like to know if their are any consequences to this weird 'technique'. -
Thanks Wesley, that makes sense... but what's most weird to me is that Google keeps their pages in the index despite this trick... unless the 302 redirect allows legitimately that (maybe for a limited time)?
-
I don't think the word 'cloaking' is the right word since that is hiding content from users which you do want to present to the search engines. It is pretty weird though. A 302 should be a temporarily redirect and that they want to no-index the link it redirects to could make sense in some way.
If they are planning on changing the website then they could be temporarily redirecting the url's to new ones which they don't want to be indexed. When they have made the necessary changes they will remove the redirect and possibly the no-index pages.
Seems like a weird workaround but i've seen people thinking in weirder ways before.
It's more probably that they suffered from a panda or penguin update and that just like you they thought they could recover with a no-index (and a redirect?).Pretty weird story, curious to see if anyone else has some kind of explanation to why someone would set their site up like this.
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
-
Technical Site Migration
Hello All- I have been in the SEO industry for about 4 years and feel fairly confident in my technical SEO; however, I am being asked to conduct a migration that is both a platform change (step 1) then a consolidation change (think of combining websites when a company is acquired) all within a 4-5 month time span. I feel like as I begin to create this multi-step checklist I would love to hear of others that have gone through something similar or have resources you could point me to form more of a process/procedure standpoint. Again - I feel confident in the technical output but I have a fairly junior team and want to execute this smoothly. Feel free to add recommendations or ask for clarification if my discussion question doesn't make sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instructure0 -
Site Migration and Traffic Help!
Hi Moz, I recently migrated my website with the help of an SEO company using 301 redirects. The reason for the move was to change our CMS from .aspx to Drupal/Wordpress. The homepage (www.shiftins.com) and the blog (www.shiftins.com/blog) were the only two pages that kept the same url. Everything else was redirected. It's been about two months since the redirects were completed and traffic has dropped off about 90%. I'm starting to worry that something was not done properly and my traffic may never return. The process for the redirects seem correct when I checked the work the SEO company did. All pages were duplicated, redirected to individual pages, then the old pages were de-indexed. Are there any insights the community can provide? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shictins1 -
Article section on site or blog?
So, I've just started using MOZ since I've decided I wanna be an "expert" in SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
I run a couple of successful websites in Denmark and I've had some SEO guy do some SEO a few years back, but now I wanna learn this myself. I've already read a lot of books, blogs on the subject and talked with several SEO "experts". Anyways, I have a concrete "problem" which I need some help on deciding what to do. Its the same issue / dilemma on all my sites. Dilemma
On my site i have a menu-section called Articles and tips. As the name implies it's basically articles and tips on subjects related to the site.
The articles are both informal for the users and I also use these to attract new users on specific keywords.
The articles are not "spam" articles or quickly made articles, the actually give good information to the users and are wellwritten and so. I've hired a girl to create more articles, so there will be a good flow on articles, interviews and so on soon. Some SEO guys tells me, that I should create and use a external blog "instead" and post the articles there instead of on my site. (ex www.newsiteblog.com) And another SEO guy tells me that I should run a blog on my own site (ex www.ownsite.com/blog) , where I post the articles. I have a really hard time deciding what is the best way, since I hear all kinds of ideas, and really dont know who to trust. My own idea is, that it seems "stupid" to take content from the site and put on external blog.
Then I would also have to create a new blog, and point links from that to my site and so. Any of you guys have any ideas? Sorry for my bad english.0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Can DIVS that look like frames hurt?
We are working with a site that has what appears to be a frame in the middle but it is not targeting a new html page it is just a div hiding content until you use the scroll bar. What are best practices for working with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteoptimized0 -
Magneto site with many pages
just finsihed scan to a magento site. off course I am getting thousand of pages that are dynamic. search pages and other. checking with site command on Google I see 154,000 results which pages it is recommended to block? some people are talking about blocking the search pages and some actually talking about allowing them? any answer on this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Were small sites hit by Panda?
It seems that primarily large sites were hit by Panda, but does any one know of / own a small site that was hit by Panda?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?
Howdy all, The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase. In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.) The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process. The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qurve0