Would reviews being served to a search engine user agent through a noscript tag (but not shown for other user types) be considered cloaking?
-
This one is tough, and I've asked it once here, http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Is-having-rich-snippets-placed-below-a-review-that-is-pulled-via-javascript-considered-bad-grey-hat-SEO, but I feel that the response was sided with the company.
As an SEO or digital marketer, it seems that if we are pulling in our reviews via iframe for our users, but serving them through a nonscript tag when the user agent is a search engine, that this could be considered cloaking.
I understand that the "intent" may be to show the same thing to the bots as the user sees, but if you look at the view source, you'll never see the reviews, because it would only be delivered to the search engine bot.
What do you think?
-
I can't speak to the BV implementation aspect as I have no experience with it, however I will echo and agree with Takeshi on the other points as they are the best practice scenario
-
BV does provide a newer format for their reviews, if your server allows server side scripting such as PHP. I believe it's called "Cloud SEO". This is the simplest solution.
If you can't run PHP, then I would recommend talking to YourStoreWizards (http://www.yourstorewizards.com/). They provide customized solutions that can automate the data pulling and updating process.
As far as reviews.mysite.com, you want to get that de-indexed as soon as you get the HTML reviews on your site. Otherwise, not only will the subdomain compete with your main site for traffic, bu tall the reviews on your site will be seen as duplicate content.
-
Alright, this is where we are with this. What Takeshi recommended is a work around. Yes, it works, but it takes more man hours to constantly upload the info. If someone wanted to do this more seamlessly, how could we do that? I don't have an answer quite yet (but wanted to post our follow-up in case someone else stumbles upon this Q&A), but we're going to the company with these questions:
- We need someone on the phone that understands SEO and the BV installation on our site being SEO friendly; i.e. not a developer that knows about implementing BV, but an SEO person that understands the difference between cloaking and duplicate content with product pages.
- We want to know how we can get our product reviews on our product pages that can be seen in the html of the page; i.e. I can view source and see the review content there. This is inline with Takeshi's work around, but is there an easier way to do this where it's automatic?
- Having the reviews sent over via javascript when the bot requests the info seems to be inline with cloaking behavior that is considered bad with the search engines.
- We don’t want to add a ~1.5 second delay to getting the info pulled over for the bots to see it, as this will increase our PageSpeed. However, this seems to be the next best solution for getting up-to-date reviews in the code of the product page.
I know, not every tool is perfect, but if there is a gap here, I'd imagine that one of largest companies in review management would be able to tackle this - don't you think?
To me, this feels like our content is being hi-jacked. I have my reviews in iframes (sort of speak) on my product pages, but also at reviews.mysite.com/product-reviews, which is essentially duplicating my product pages... we're competing with ourselves. Is the best fix to NOINDEX that subdomain and not let the reviews be seen at all, or keep the pages up and just compete with ourselves in the SERPs? Or is there an easy way to get those reviews (our reviews) seen on our site from users and bots?
-
Perfect! Thanks again for the follow-up!
-
Yup. Once you have the GWT verification in the header, you should be able to deindex the entire subdomain instantly.
-
That sounds like the answer Takeshi! We were worried about manually doing it because the user wouldn't see their reviews instantly, but with how you're doing it, it doesn't matter, and (like you said) it shouldn't muddy the user experience.
Are you referring to the "Remove URLs" tool in Google Webmaster for deindexing?
-
Yes, we manually bulk upload the HTML reviews every couples weeks or so to keep them fresh. We also had BV noindex the review.subdomain so that it wasn't competing with us in the SERPs (have them add a noindex tag in the header as well as your Google Webmaster Tools verification code, so you can instantly deindex all the pages).
-
Great idea for having a link to an html version. How do you keep those updated? Is it manual? And do you just block the pages that they create over on the review.mysite.com sub-domain?
That is actually where we started looking at fixing things. I see that sub-domain they created as basically competing with our product pages. Why would that ever be the way a business would want to operate their site, it doesn't make sense to do that. But all I keep hearing is name drops of big brands. It's frustrating really.
-
I'm pretty sure that it's structured markup, but I will definitely be double checking before simply guessing on this one! Thanks Alan.
-
We use BazaarVoice reviews for our ecommerce site too. What we do is right below the iframe reviews, we have a link that says "click here to see more reviews". When you click the link, it opens up a div with the html version of the reviews. So similar idea to what you are proposing, but less "cloaky" than a noscript tag, and it doesn't impact user experience much.
BazaarVoice can also do html reviews that are not iframed if you have a server that can handle server side scripting like PHP (which unfortunately our legacy Yahoo store does not).
-
Ah to have 100% guarantees for anything related to SEO.
Alas, that's not the world we live in. However, we can apply critical thinking to each choice and with that, we are more likely to be safe from the wrath of Google.
SO - for this question let's consider the following:
A "Noscript" version of a site is designed first and foremost for people who have scripts turned off, including those who have browsers set up for either security reasons or for visual impairment needs.
So if you provide content within a noscript block that essentially mirrors what visitors get when scripts are turned on, you are not likely in violation of any Google cloaking policy.
Cloaking comes into play when you generate content purely for Googlebot exclusively or Googlebot and Bingbot.
So if the content you are provided via that zip file (which I assume you then need to manually cut and paste into the noscript portion of the code) is pure content and not over-optimized, you can proceed with confidence that you'll be okay.
Where I DO have concern is this:
"The daily snapshot files contain UGC with SEO-friendly markup tags." (emphasis mine). Exactly what do they mean by that specific wording? That's the concern point. Are they referring to proper structured markup for reviews, from Schema.org or at the very least RDFa reviews markup? If not, that would be problematic because only proper "reviews" specific structured markup should wrap around reviews content.
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
-
I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
Hi Guys QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ. 1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content. Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to **ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat ** If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well? How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make? Any insight into this would be great! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
The purpose of these Algo updates: To more harshly push eCommerce sites toward PPC and enable normal blogs/forums toward reclaiming organic search positions?
Hi everyone, This is my first post here, and absolutely loving the site and the services. Just a quick background, I have dabbled in SEO in the past, and have been reading up over the last few months and am amazed at the speed at which things are changing. I currently have a few clients that I am doing some SEO work for 2 of them, and have had an ecommerce site enquire about SEO services. They are a medium sized oak furniture ecommerce site. From all the major changes..the devaluing of spam links, link networks, penalization of overuse of exact match anchor text and the overall encouraging of earned links (often via content marketing) over built links, adding to this the (not provided) section in Google Analytics, and the increasing screen real estate that PPC is getting over organic search...all points to me thinking on major thing..... That the search engine is trying to push eCommerce sites and sites that sell stuff harder toward using PPC and paid advertising and allowing the blogs/forums and informational sites to more easily reclaim the organic part of the search results again. The above is elaborated on a bit more below.. POINT 1 Firstly as built links (article submission, press releases, info graphic submission, web 2.0 link building ect) rapidly lose their effectiveness, and as Google starts to place more emphasis on sites earning links instead - by producing amazing interesting and unique content that people want to link to. The fact remains that surely Google is aware that it is much harder for eCommerce sites to produce a constant stream of interesting link worthy content around their niche (especially if its a niche that not an awful lot could be written about). Although earning links is not impossible for eCommerce sites, for a lot of them it is more difficult because creating link worthy content is not what eCommerce sites were originally intended for. Whereas standard blogs and forums were built for that exact purpose. Therefore the search engines must know that it is a lot easier for normal blogs/forums to "earn" links through content, therefore leading to them reclaiming more of the organic search ranking for transaction and non transaction terms, and therefore forcing the eCommerce sites to adopt PPC more heavily. POINT 2 If we add to the mix the fact that for the terms most relevant to eCommerce sites, the search engine results page has a larger allocation of PPC ads than organic results (above the fold), and that Google has limited the amount of data that sites can see in terms of which keywords people are using to arrive on their sites, which effects eCommerce sites more - as it makes it harder for them to see which keywords are resulting in sales. Then this provides further evidence that Google is trying to back eCommerce sites into a corner by making it more difficult for them to make sense of and track sales from organic results in comparison to with PPC, where data is still plentiful. Conclusion Are the above just over exaggerations? Can most eCommerce sites still keep achieving a good percentage of sales from organic search despite the above? if so, what do the more niche eCommerce sites do to "earn" links when content topics are thin and unique outreach destinations can be exhausted quickly. Do they accept the fact that the are in the business of selling things, so should be paying for their traffic as opposed to normal blogs/forums which are not. Or is there still a place for them to get even more creative with content and acquire earned links..? And finally, is the concentration on earned links more overplayed than it actually is? Id really appreciate your thoughts on this..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Pagination for Search Results Pages: Noindex/Follow, Rel=Canonical, Ajax Best Option?
I have a site with paginated search result pages. What I've done is noindex/follow them and I've placed the rel=canonical tag on page2, page3, page4, etc pointing back to the main/first search result page. These paginated search result pages aren't visible to the user (since I'm not technically selling products, just providing different images to the user), and I've added a text link on the bottom of the first/main search result page that says "click here to load more" and once clicked, it automatically lists more images on the page (ajax). Is this a proper strategy? Also, for a site that does sell products, would simply noindexing/following the search results/paginated pages and placing the canonical tag on the paginated pages pointing back to the main search result page suffice? I would love feedback on if this is a proper method/strategy to keep Google happy. Side question - When the robots go through a page that is noindexed/followed, are they taking into consideration the text on those pages, page titles, meta tags, etc, or are they only worrying about the actual links within that page and passing link juice through them all?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Why Does a Press Release Strategy Influence Search Results So Much?
Why do press release websites, and their submissions, carry so much influence with organic search results right now?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steelintheair1 -
Is there such thing as white hat cloaking?
We are near the end of a site redesign and come to find out its in javascript and not engine friendly. Our IT teams fix to this is show crawlable content to googlebot and others through the user agents. I told them this is cloaking and I'm not comfortable with this. They said after doing research, if the content is pretty much the same, it is an acceptable way to cloak. About 90% of the content will be the same between the "regular user" and content served to googlebot. Does anyone have any experience with this, are there any recent articles or any best practices on this? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CHECOM0 -
Why Google still display search result so bad?
When I search this keyword Backlink คือ by Google browser(Google.co.th) then I saw these Domain that is spam keyword and worse content (Spin content and can not understand what it said) อํานาจเจริญ.dmc.tv/?p=19
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | taradmkt
ฉะเชิงเทรา.dmc.tv/?p=28 พังงา.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink หนองคาย.dmc.tv/?p=97 ขอนแก่น.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink ชัยนาท.dmc.tv/?p=70 ตราด.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink etc As you can see the search result**.** My question is 1. How to tell Google to check these network 2. Why these network display Top 10 for 3 weeks!!!!! and after that they rank drop. 3. Why Facebook page rank on Google in the search result Please make me clear.0 -
Does it fall under cloaking in pagination?
When i am trying to implement rel=next and prev tag in my pages and due to prefetching feature of firefox browser some how more calls are coming to my server for one page and its effecting my page performance. Solution that i can think of is 1. Increase my server capacity to handle it smoothly - not possible to invest for this change 2. Show this tags only when bot crawls the pages and not when user is coming through browser. My question is does option 2 fall under cloaking ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Myntra0 -
Hidden H1 tag - ?permissable
Until now I have been building websites either from scratch or with a template. Recently I decided to learn Adobe Dreamweaver. At the end of the first "Building a Website using Dreamweaver" lesson, the author notes the site is done but an H1 tag is missing. The instructor advises "The page doesn't have a top-level heading ( ). The design uses the banner image instead. This looks fine in a browser, but search engines and screen readers expect pages to be organized with a proper hierarchy of headings: at the top of the page, ..." The instructor then walks readers step-by-step into creating an H1 tag and using absolute positioning of -500px top to cause the tag to not be visible. My initial thought was the instructor was completely wrong for offering this advise, and users would be banned from search engines for following these instructions. I had planned to contact the writer and suggest the instructions be modified. Prior to doing such, I wanted to request a bit of feedback. The banner image's text in this example is "Check Magazine: Fashion and Lifestyle". The H1 tag that is created and positioned off-screen uses that exact same text. In an old blog comment, Matt Cutts shared "If you’re straight-out using CSS to hide text, don’t be surprised if that is called spam. I’m not saying that mouseovers or DHTML text or have-a-logo-but-also-have-text is spam; I answered that last one at a conference when I said “imagine how it would look to a visitor, a competitor, or someone checking out a spam report. If you show your company’s name and it’s Expo Markers instead of an Expo Markers logo, you should be fine. If the text you decide to show is ‘Expo Markers cheap online discount buy online Expo Markers sale …’ then I would be more cautious, because that can look bad.”" I would like to get some mozzer feedback on this topic. Do you view this technique as white hat? black hat? or grey hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RyanKent0