Google crawling different content--ever ok?
-
Here are a couple of scenarios I'm encountering where Google will crawl different content than my users on initial visit to the site--and which I think should be ok. Of course, it is normally NOT ok, I'm here to find out if Google is flexible enough to allow these situations:
1. My mobile friendly site has users select a city, and then it displays the location options div which includes an explanation for why they may want to have the program use their gps location. The user must choose the gps, the entire city, or he can enter a zip code, or choose a suburb of the city, which then goes to the link chosen. OTOH it is programmed so that if it is a Google bot it doesn't get just a meaningless 'choose further' page, but rather the crawler sees the page of results for the entire city (as you would expect from the url), So basically the program defaults for the entire city results for google bot, but for for the user it first gives him the initial ability to choose gps.
2. A user comes to mysite.com/gps-loc/city/results The site, seeing the literal words 'gps-loc' in the url goes out and fetches the gps for his location and returns results dependent on his location. If Googlebot comes to that url then there is no way the program will return the same results because the program wouldn't be able to get the same long latitude as that user.
So, what do you think? Are these scenarios a concern for getting penalized by Google?
Thanks, Ted
-
Thanks Cyrus. Very good points!
-
Thanks Sheena. In the second scenario good point--they are generated via user POST so in theory Google should never see them or index them, but since they can be shared Google ends up finding them, so I do need to make sure Google doesn't index them if possible.
-
This is not the definition of cloaking and I wouldn't worry too much about any penalty.
That said, anytime you redirect googlebot to a different experience than users it's a situation you want to be very careful with, and in most situations avoid. Often this is solved by serving different experiences via javascript. Even though Google is pretty darn good at parsing javascript, they will often interpret the default version of a page as if the javascript is turned off.
Regardless, I'd keep an eye on search results, Google Webmaster Tools, cached versions of your site and make ample use of "Fetch and Render" in GWT to ensure Google interprets your site they way you think it should.
-
I do not have experience with any site using this type of selector, but theoretically you should not encounter any problems as you're showing different content with the intent of improving the experience, not to deceive. If Google handles this like an ip-redirect, then you should be fine.
In scenario 2, however, I'm wondering if you even want Google to index these URLs - since it sounds like these URLs will be dynamically generated & might end up being duplicates of other pages on the site (similar to internal search pages). Something to watch out for!
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
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Google Webmaster tools -Fixing over 20,000+ crawl errors
Hi, I'm trying to gather all the 404 crawl errors on my website after a recent hacking that I've been trying to rectify and clean up. Webmaster tools states that I have over 20 000+ crawl errors. I can only download a sample of 1000 errors. Is there any way to get the full list instead of correcting 1000 errors, marking them as fixed and waiting for the next batch of 1000 errors to be listed in Webmaster tools? The current method is quite timely and I want to take care of all errors in one shot instead of over a course of a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
If a website Uses <select>to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
If a website Uses <select> to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Merge content pages together to get one deep high quality content page - good or not !?
Hi, I manage the SEO of a brand poker website that provide ongoing very good content around specific poker tournaments, but all this content is split into dozens of pages in different sections of the website (blog section, news sections, tournament section, promotion section). It seems like today having one deep piece of content in one page has better chance to get mention / social signals / links and therefore get a higher authority / ranking / traffic than if this content was split into dozens of pages. But the poker website I work for and also many other website do generate naturally good content targeting long tail keywords around a specific topic into different section of the website on an ongoing basis. Do you we need once a while to merge those content pages into one page ? If yes, what technical implementation would you advice ? (copy and readjust/restructure all content into one page + 301 the URL into one). Thanks Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is it allowed to have different alt on same image on different pages?
Hi, I have images that match several different keywords and I wondered if I can give them different alts based on the page that they are displayed or will Google be angry with me? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Duplicate Content on Blog
I have a blog I'm setting up. I would like to have a mini-about block set up on every page that gives very brief information about me and my blog, as well as a few links to the rest of the site and some social sharing options. I worry that this will get flagged as duplicate content because a significant amount of my pages will contain the same information at the top of the page, front and center. Is there anything I can do to address this? Is it as much of a concern as I am making it? Should I work on finding some javascript/ajax method for loading that content into the page dynamically only for normal browser pageviews? Any thoughts or help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0