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
-
Site's meta description is not being shown in Google Search results. Instead our privacy policy is getting indexed.
We re-launched our new site and put in the re-directs. Our site is https://www.fico.com/en. When I search for "fico" in Google. I see the privacy policy getting indexed as meta descriptions instead of our actual meta description. I have edited the meta description, requested Google to re-index our site. Not sure what to do next? Thanks for your advise.
Technical SEO | | gosheen0 -
Google News problem
Hello to all. The latest Google algorithm changes have had a big impact on the way that Google news features stories, at least in my country. I've been featured heavily in Google News until about 6th of october, when the changes had the biggest impact, but since then, I haven't been featured at all. Prior to this, I would be featured for keywords on almost any article, not necessarily on the 1st position, but I was almost always there. Posts still show up in the dedicated News category, but not in the main search pages. I've seen a lot of websites being impacted, but some with lower ranks than mine still show up there. I haven't done any changes prior to the 6th of october, and I haven't done any link building campaings, just getting links from higher ranking news sites in my country, for articles I wrote. What I'd like to know is if there were any major changes for Google News and I'm not complying with any of them, or If i could check to see if there are any other problems. I don't have any penalties disclosed by Google, and no new errors in the Webmasters console, I'm just baffled by the fact that overnight the website was completely cut off from being featured in Google News. And one other strange thing, I'm now ranking better for searches that are kind of opposite to my website's main theme. Think about mainly writing about BMW, and less about AUDI, but ranking a lot better for the latter, and a lot less for the other. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | thefrost0 -
Google Enterprise Search Questions
Hi Everybody, A client has asked me to take a look at Google Enterprise Search for them. It has been a few years since I last fooled around with implementing a Google search box on a website, and that was the free version which included off-site results in the results. This appears to be the main page describing the paid product: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/ I have three questions: The search testing function on the above page doesn't seem to be working. I'm typing in a URL and search term, as prompted, and the page is simply refreshing. It never provides me an example set of results. Is it working for you? This client has a moderately large e-commerce site (about 200 products). Have you implemented Google enterprise search on such a site and are you happy with its performance? The goal here is to let users search for a topic and be returned both product and informational pages. How well does this tool do this? Am I going to need to know any special types of coding (beyond html/css) to implement this? If so, what are they? If you have experience with this product, I would surely appreciate your feedback. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | MiriamEllis0 -
Does anyone use pingler and is it any good
Hi, i have joined pingler and pay per month to use it but i have not seen any difference with traffic or google rankings and i would like to know if anyone else is using the paid version of pingler.com and if they find it a good service
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How do I get google to index the right pages with the right key word?
Hello I notice that even though I have a site map google is indexing the wrong pages under the wrong key words. As a result its not as relevant and is not ranking properly.
Technical SEO | | ursalesguru0 -
One Keyword Penalty
Hi There, Quick question for everyone. Is it possible to get penalized a keyword level not page level. I have a site that only seems to be penalized on one keyword which is currently at page 22, whilst the rest are on page 1 or page 2. I came to the site late so I have no idea when the site lost its ranking for this keyword after a site redesign but the onpage is almost the same. Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Does google use the wayback machine to determine the age of a site?
I have a site that I had removed from the wayback machine because I didn't want old versions to show. However I noticed that in many seo tools the site now always shows a domain age of zero instead of 6 years ago when I registered it. My question is what do the actual search engines use to determine age when they factor it into the ranking algorithm? By having it removed from the wayback machine, does that make the search engines think the site is brand new? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FastLearner0 -
Duplication Penalty through Specs?
I am trying to figure our how to correct a recently incurred duplication penalty on a partner site. I didn't see any posts on this yet specific to my problem. The site used to be ranked on page 1 of Google for all important keywords but now we ran into the situation that many pages were bumped to pos 100 or lower due to duplication issues. This is an aviation site, discussing airplanes and each page discusses a different model but each page also has the specs of the plane and while the data parts are different for each plane the specification terms are the same ,see here: Primary Function:
Technical SEO | | WizardHQ
Crew:
Engine:
Thrust:
Weight Empty:
Max. Weight:
Length:
Wingspan:
Cruise Speed:
Max.Speed:
Climb:
Ceiling:
Range:
First Flight:
Year Deployed: Is there an easy way to get Google to stop including these terms (not the data in the 2nd column) from the page anaysis to prevent this causing the duplication issues we are are seeing due to this? Thanks in advance!0