Is there an issue if we show our old mobile site to Google & new site to users
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Hi,
We have our existing mobile site that contains interlinking in footer & content and new mobile site that does not have interlinking. We will show existing mobile site to google crawler & new mobile site to users. Will this be taken as black hat by Google.
The mobile site & desktop site will have same url across devices & browsers.
Regards
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If you serve a different content to the crawler, that's cloaking and you will face the wrath of google (de-indexing).
If you serve different content based on user-agent/screen-width etc... It should not de-index you for cloaking.
Google has very precise instructions on what a site owner should do in your case, and serving different html and css based on user-agent is perfectly fine, as long as you follow their instructions on how to supply google crawler additional information through http headers.
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Hi Guys,
Thanks for your valuable input however our mobile sites(both old & new mobile site) & desktop site will have same url across devices & browsers. The only difference is of content & design on old and new mobile site. Will this still be considered as black hat.
Regards
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Based on personal experience I can confirm what Laura said, google crawler is extremely skilled at recognizing cloaking and it's very aggressive at penalizing websites which does cloak content.
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If you have a new mobile site, best practice is to 301 redirect the old site to the new site. If you do that, the value of your links will pass to the new mobile site which will help you maintain your rankings. Laura is correct, what you are proposing is black hat and very risky.
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This is definitely a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines, and I would certainly consider it a black hat tactic. You risk doing more harm than good.
This is what Google has to say about it here:
It's a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines to redirect a user to a different page with the intent to display content other than what was made available to the search engine crawler.
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