301 Redirect & Cloaking
-
HEllo~~~~ People.
I have a question regarding on cloaking.
I will be really greatful if you can help me with question.
I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries.
So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries.
e.g. www.example.com/us/
www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on.
Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries.
Here is my question.
I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com,
my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect.
In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking?
Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
-
Artience Girl, the information shared by Shane, Aaron and Lewis is correct.
Google wants to see the same page as it would be shown to a user under the same circumstances. If Google is crawling your page from San Jose California, then they want to see what a user from San Jose would see. If they decide to later crawl your site from their center in London, they want to see your site as it would be seen by a London user. The geo-targeting redirects you are presently doing are fine.
If you were to write any code which says to always show the Google crawler the US version of your site, then that tactic would be defined as cloaking. Any time you write code to specifically identify a crawler and show it different content, then you are cloaking.
It seems you are a bit uncomfortable with the answers so let me set you at ease by sharing a Matt Cutts response to your question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw
-
Hi Shane Thomas.
Thanks for your feedback.
Actually contents is not exactly same, but alot similar. Because I sell different products for different countries.
For example, I sell 30 products for US but only 10 products for UK. In this case, my UK site has only pages for 10 products. Of course, contents lay out and products are similar.
In this case, should I worry about cloaking?
Also, how search engine can see "intent is not deceptive or not"?
I always wondering about that. ^^
-
Hello, Lewis-SEO. Thanks for your reply, but I am not totally following your answer.
What do you mean by "Google only version of the site"?
You mentioned as follow.
"You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL"
Is this meaning that I should set "user agent redirection" for Google bot to send it to particular regional site? e.g. send Google bot to only www.example.com/us/ no matter which country IP address Google bot has?
Please correct me, if I am wrong. But this sounds more cloacking to me.
Google bot with DE IP address should redirect to www.example.com/de/ so google bot can crawl right contents. And when Google bot with UK IP addres should redirect to www.example.com/uk/.
I think if I send alll Google bot to www.example.com/us/ for example, it will confuse google bot more.
Could you please be more specific regarding your answer? PLEASE ~~~
-
Hi Artience Girl
The Google Webmaster guidelines covers topics like these but a key point is that geotargetting using IP address is fine as long as you are not showing Google a separate Google only version of the site. This would be considered cloaking.
You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL
But before you do that check the Google Webmaster guidelines in and around this area as if you follow them you are less likely to end up on the wrong side of them.
Hope this helps.
-
This really does not fit the description of cloaking, the content is the same, just different languages right?
If this is the case IMO this would not bee seen as cloaking as your are not delivering different content, just user experience.
Also as long as you are not separating IP delivery by source (meaning sending spiders somewhere different than humans) this would not be the definition of cloaking.
WIKI:
One use of IP delivery is to determine the requestor's location, and deliver content specifically written for that country. This isn't necessarily cloaking. For instance, Google uses IP delivery for AdWords and AdSense advertising programs to target users in different geographic locations.
As of 2006, many sites have taken up IP delivery to personalise content for their regular customers. Many of the top 1000 sites, including sites like Amazon (amazon.com), actively use IP delivery. None of these have been banned from search engines **as their intent is not deceptive. ** Keyword here..... Deceptive
-
I don't think this would come across as cloaking at all. It's a fairly common practice.
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
-
Can i do 301 redirect
So this is what im doing, 301 redirect to my site/allen-webdesign points to main domain Allen is the city i have a page called local-webdesign with all the cities. Will this improve my ranking or should i stop?
Technical SEO | | jsdfw0 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Buying a domain to 301 redirect for increased rankings
A large competitor has recently purchased a large marketing company that specializes in their industry. As a part of this acquisition they obtained ownership of www.digitalsherpa.com, which is now 301 redirecting some 50K links to www.costar.com/. When I did a site:www.digitalsherpa.com search all of the origin URLs had title tags from the costar site in place of their own. My question is: Does this violate Google spam guidelines? search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Adigitalsherpa.com&oq=site&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i65j69i60j0l2.1919j0j7
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
Redirect a 301 Redirect
Does any link juice get passed from a permanent redirect to a new 301 redirect? If so, are there any studies which indicate an estimated percentage?
Technical SEO | | RedCaffeine0 -
Automatically write Mass 301 redirects for csv
Hi Guys Does anyone know if there is away to write say 30 x 301 redirects in one go? I have a list from a client with old links and new links and I want to do it all at once. Any suggestions would be appreciate?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Should I do a 301 redirect
Hi Everyone, Hope you can help me out here. I have .co.uk & .ie website with similar content. On a particular section of the .co.uk website it is updated daily (Q&As, Blog posts etc) .ie does have this section but to a lesser degree, no daily updates etc, I was wondering if we should simply do a 301 redirect when someone is on the .ie website to .co.uk, it means the user is getting a much better experience however not entirely the consequences from search engines on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Paul781 -
How to verify a page-by-page level 301 redirect was done correctly?
Hello, I told some tech guys to do a page-by-page relevant 301 redirect (as talked about in Matt Cutts video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA) when a company wanted to move to a new domain when their site was getting redesigned. I found out they did a 302 redirect on accident and had to fix that, so now I don't trust they did the page-by-page relevant redirect. I have a feeling they just redirected all of the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new domain. How could I confirm this suspicion? I run the old domain through screaming frog and it only shows 1 URL - the homepage. Does that mean they took all of the pages on the old domain offline? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EvolveCreative0 -
301 redirects & merging two sites into one
We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | Gmorgan0