Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to use overlays without getting a Google penalty
-
One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period.
Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal.
Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay.
What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe?
We are considering the following approaches:
First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards.
No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty?
Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking?
I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.
-
Thanks. We've decided not to go down the no index route because although these pages don't have significant rankings and therefore don't drive much in the way of SEO traffic, they do contribute to the overall authority status of the site and the directories in which they sit.
For example, a hotel deal will sit within the hotels directory/sub folder so to no index all these details we fear would undermine the overall authority of this directory.
I think we are going to go with making the first paragraph visible to the users and search engines... and probably look at combining that with First Click Free
-
I would say its all a matter of implementation. Many media sites do full page ad overlays without issue. Cloaking only becomes an issue when you are showing the engines one thing and the users another. To solve this you COULD no-index (assuming you dont need the pages to be indexed) or you could simply show google the same overlay as you show the user. You could possibly even use an intermediary page.
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
-
If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?
I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!
Technical SEO | | jgresalfi0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
Google not pulling my favicon
Several sites use Google favicon to load favicons instead of loading it from the Website itself. Our favicon is not being pulled from our site correctly, instead it shows the default "world" image. https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=www.example.com Is the address to pull a favicon. When I post on G+ or see other sites that use that service to pull favicons ours isn't displaying, despite it shows up in Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc and we have the correct meta in all pages of our site. Any idea why is this happening? Or how to "ping" Google to update that?
Technical SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
MBG Tracker...how to use it?
So I am a new blogger that has been submitting guest blog posts to a number of different blogs. It was recommended that I use the MBG Tracker so I can track the back links. The problem is that I am totally lost on how to use this tool. As I said before I am new to this whole thing and I am not really sure what constitutes a "base link" and a "back link." In the author bylines we are linking to different pages within a larger website. If anyone can help me I would really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | Stroll0 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google Off/On Tags
I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan1