Charity project for local women's shelter - need help: will Google notice if you alter the document title with Javascript after the page loads?
-
I am doing some pro-bono work with a local shelter for female victims of domestic abuse. I am trying to help visitors to the site cover their tracks by employing a document.title change when the page loads using JavaScript. This shelter receives a lot of traffic from Google. I worry that the Google bots will see this javascript change and somehow penalize this site or modify the title in the SERPs. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of javascript maneuver? All help would be greatly appreciated!
-
I would set up a test first, as i have not used it myself. It may not work on all browsers.
good luck
-
Alan -
Wow, great response. I really appreciate your help. The ASP solution does look sophisticated; I think I will look into that as a longer term solution/more sustainable solution.
Cheers!
Jeff
-
There is a way to do this but you need to be using ASP.Net and is a fair bit of work http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc488548.aspx
These 2 solutions do not remove from addres bar in IE, but do remove from history
history.go(-1);
window.location.href = 'http://thatsit.com.au'
window.location.replace('fakePage.html')
-
There is a way of replacing your page in history, but this does not remove it from the address bar drop down, I think this was a way for old browsers. I am not sure if it is clocking either.
window.location.replace('fakePage.html')
There is a way to check if the user is uing private browsing, but its not easy, you need to check the color of a visisted link. But by this time they have already landed on your page.
I have to say i dont know a way around, if i think of somthing I will get back
-
does it? OK I didnt think it would.
There is a way of making sure you do not appear in the history but i cant remember how it was done.
give me a moment and illl try and find an old website where i did somthingh like this.
-
Alan, thank you. Changing the title does refresh how the entry appears in the browser history. The cloaking issue is what I am worried about - you believe Google will see this and penalize?
-
Ryan, thank you so much for your thorough answer. I appreciate the help!
-
Thank you, Rand. I'll be emailing you shortly.
-
jkonowitch - if you want to email me privately with more detail, I'd be happy to help and leverage any contacts I can as well (if necessary). Broadly speaking, I might suggest that a javascript title change may be less valuable than helping visitors understand how to more fully remove obvious signs in their browser/on their computer.
-
Security and Accessibility are always at odds. The easier information is to access, the less secure it is and vice versa.
You can place your site behind a login which would require all users to register. Google will then have a lot less information about your site and any visitor activity. The problem will then be your pages will no longer be listed in Google's index.
Any additional security really needs to come from the end of the person surfing your site. They could visit your site through a proxy server, clear cache, clear cookies, etc. You can help users by educating them on these steps. There are numerous counter-balances as well. If you are attempting to improve user security, the above can help but it is far from perfect. A pc can have tracking software installed, a router can trace activity, etc.
-
How is that going to cover their tracks? the origianl title will show in any history. and you can simply use in private browsing to hide where you have visited if that is your aim. Gogole may not notice but if and when they do you will be done for cloaking.
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
-
Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
Hey all - I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address. I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses. An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all. Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated. http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AtticusBerg10 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Google and JavaScript
Hey there! Recent announcements at Google to encourage webmasters to let Google crawl Java Script http://www.googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/rendering-pages-with-fetch-as-google.html We have always put JS and CSS behind robots.txt, but now considering taking them out of robots. Any opinions on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Is there any SEO advantage to sharing links on twitter using google's url shortener goo.gl/
Hi is there any advantage to using <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> to shorten a URL for Twitter instead of other ones? I had a thought that <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> might allow google to track click throughs and hence judge popularity.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Why does Google show Titles different than the coded titles?
Hi, I've noticed that on many pages Google shows on the SERPS titles that he chose for me and not necessarily the ones coded in the Title tag (usually small difference like adding suffix etc.). Why is that? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Multiple Locations Google Places (URL's)?
I'm managing a restaurant chain with 10 locations. Can they all share the home page url of the corporate site in Google Places or is it better to link each location url separately? Meaning can I use www.company.com for all locations in Google places for all locations or is it better to go with www.company.com/location.html for each location. The page authority of the home page is 60 while individual location pages the page authority is in the 20's. Hope this makes sense. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YMD
Gary0 -
Why is google automatically showing my competitor's result even when customer types in our brand name on the query?
This is little weird. We run a website specific to mobile phones called as 91mobiles.com. The site has gained lot of user interest and trust in the last 2 years [pre-dominantly indian users]. Lot of our users type mobile phone model and 91mobiles as the query. Example "Sony Xperia P 91mobiles". Google is showing gsmarena.com results on top and then shows our own results below! What's annoying is the fact that google also bolds the term gsmarena [denoting that it's a synonym]. Any idea why this is happening? We are very sure that we are not doing anything wrong..We have worked really hard for the last 2 years to reach where we are..and it's kind of hard to see gsmarena siphoning away our traffic for no reason at all [even when customer types in 91mobiles a part of the query to quality it]...Can some experts here demystify this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaadi0 -
Does a 'Certified Domain' help SEO?
I see that GoDaddy offer a 'Certified Domain' option. Does this help SEO at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy0