What this site is doing? Does it look like cloaking to you?
-
Hi here,
I was studying our competitors SEO strategies, and I have noticed that one of our major competitors has setup something pretty weird from a SEO stand point for which I would like to know your thoughts about because I can't find a clear explanation for it.
Here is the deal: the site is musicnotes.com, and their product pages are located inside the /sheetmusic/ directory, so if you want to see all their product pages indexed on Google, you can just type in Google:
site:musicnotes.com inurl:/sheetmusic/
Then you will get about 290,000 indexed pages. No, here is the tricky part: try to click on one of those links, then you will get a 302 redirect to a page that includes a meta "noindex, nofollow" directive.
Isn't that pretty weird? Why would they want to "nonidex, nofollow" a page from a 302 redirect? And how in the heck the redirecting page is still in the index?!! And how Google can allow that?!
All this sounds weird to me and remind me spammy techniques of the 90s called "cloaking"... what do you think?
-
Sure I will! Thanks!
-
If you still need SEO and/or programming advice/work done after the summer let me know
-
Ok, nice to know.. we are always looking for passionate people that can work with us. Thanks!
-
At the moment I am very busy with a couple of projects. In general I do work as a SEO consultant.
Actually i'm a programmer, but down the line I started to fall in love with SEO and started to do that too. -
Yes, I'd like to know that tool.
A question: do you offer SEO consultation?
Thank you again Wesley.
-
Apperently Google keeps the original URL in the index as the source. It some ways it makes sense to do this.
It is still a pretty weird trick and I still don't know a good reason to do this. Would like to know if their are any consequences to this weird 'technique'. -
Thanks Wesley, that makes sense... but what's most weird to me is that Google keeps their pages in the index despite this trick... unless the 302 redirect allows legitimately that (maybe for a limited time)?
-
I don't think the word 'cloaking' is the right word since that is hiding content from users which you do want to present to the search engines. It is pretty weird though. A 302 should be a temporarily redirect and that they want to no-index the link it redirects to could make sense in some way.
If they are planning on changing the website then they could be temporarily redirecting the url's to new ones which they don't want to be indexed. When they have made the necessary changes they will remove the redirect and possibly the no-index pages.
Seems like a weird workaround but i've seen people thinking in weirder ways before.
It's more probably that they suffered from a panda or penguin update and that just like you they thought they could recover with a no-index (and a redirect?).Pretty weird story, curious to see if anyone else has some kind of explanation to why someone would set their site up like this.
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
-
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Linking from a corporate site to a brand site.
Is there an SEO impact to a large corporation linking from a corporate and/or a divisional site to a specific brand site with it's own top level domain? We would like to keep the traffic coming, but not if it will be seen as a black hat tactic. My guess is that Google will be smart enough to see that the corporation owns the brand and at least not penalize us, but I am wondering if anyone else has this experience? Google Analytics is calling it self-referral.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrbobland0 -
Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
How to build authority links and how they look ?
Hi how to build authority links and how they look ? If you could give a few examples so that i can see how it looks. and i have 9 linking root domains which is really low. so what are linking root domains ? and what i need to about that ? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek991 -
Does google have trigger words it does not like?
If we mention words such as supplement or lesser word cosmetic are they a trigger to anything Google side such as a more through look at the website or such as I can see sex ect being one. I am not selling the above but we do sell the stickers for them (not the sex ones) so just airing on caution on weather to have a page talking about them on the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Site structure question
Hello Everyone, I have a question regarding site structure and I would like to mastermind it with everyone. So I am optimizing a website for a Ford Dealership in Boston, MA. The way the site architecture is set up is as follows: Home >>>> New Inventory >>> Inventory Page (with search refinement choices) After you refine your search (lets say we choose a Ford F150 in white) it shows a page with images, price information and specs. (Nothing the bots or users can sink their teeth into) My thoughts are to create category pages for each Ford model with awesome written content and THEN link to the inventory pages. So it would look like this: Home >>> New Inventory >>> Ford 150 Awesome Category Page>>>>Ford F150 Inventory Page I would work hard at getting these category pages to rank for the vehicle for our GEO targeted locations. Here is my questions: Would you be annoyed to first land on a category page with lots of written text, reviews images and videos first and then link off to the inventory page. Or would you prefer to go right from the new inventory page to the actual inventory page and start looking for vehicles? Thanks you so much, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0 -
How to see which site Google views as a scraper site?
If we have content on our site that is found on another site, what is the best way to know which site Google views as the original source? If you search for a line of the content such as "xyz abc etc" and the other site shows before yours in search results, does that mean that Google views that site as the original source?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0