Cloaking? Best Practices Crawling Content Behind Login Box

[nopadon]

Hi-

I'm helping out a client, who publishes sale information (fashion sales etc.)

In order for the client to view the sale details (date, percentage off etc.) they need to register for the site.

If I allow google bot to crawl the content, (identify the user agent) but serve up a registration light box  to anyone who isn't google would this be considered cloaking?

Does anyone know what the best practice for this is?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Nopadon

[Nobody1560986989723]

Can I say I admire your inventiveness?  You go to some lengths to not register and really, apart from the majority of people not knowing how to do a reverse image search, probably reflects people's attitude to those sorts of lightbox registration forms.

[KeriMorgret]

I'm going to respond from a human point of view and not a technical point of view.

I've been searching for houses recently on Craigslist. There are a couple of real estate agents who post ads on CL with a link to their site. When you click the link, you get a lightbox requiring that you fill out the lead form to be able to see the details of the house. I do one of two things:

1. I open up IE in private browsing mode and paste in the URL. The private browsing mode has something that prevents this script from running and I can see the house details just fine.

2. If the house address is not provided in the CL ad, I'll copy the image URL of one of the CL photos and put that into a Google reverse image search. I'll find a different website that has posted the same house and use their site that doesn't require me to register. (I realize this may not happen in your scenario above).

I agree what the other people say about not wanting provide one thing to Google and another to users, and wanted to add that people will try to find ways around the registration. I don't have a solution for you, sadly.

[Nobody1560986989723]

Heya there,

Thanks for asking your question here

My first point would be that human visitors don't like to be given forms when they first visit a site, so would suggest you don't do this.

My alternative strategy would be to provide a home page of good content talking about the data etc that is available on your site and then provide a button for people to register if they want to.

Don't detect the user agent and provide alternative content as, however good your intentions are, that could be considered cloaking. Google is against you providing Google different content to humans, so don't do it.

Do things differently