Is there an issue if we show our old mobile site to Google & new site to users
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Why Is Google Showing My Images Upside Down in the Index?
Hi, My client has PDFs of their catalog on the site which google is indexing. However, it seems that google is taking an image from the catalog and then showing it upside in the index for images/search results. The images are not upside down on the site. Has anyone heard of this happening before or does anyone know a way to fix it? Thanks
Web Design | | AliMac260 -
Community Discussion: UX & SEO – Your experience?
We've been looking at the relationship between SEO & UX a bit more closely lately on the blog. Our good pal Cyrus started the wheels turning with a tweet: https://twitter.com/CyrusShepard/status/748296076411625473 ...and that morphed into a Whiteboard Friday idea, which was filmed and posted here: https://moz.com/blog/ux-vs-seo-whiteboard-friday We shared the story of one site that enjoyed rapid growth and that subsequently battled with managing that UX/SEO relationship on Thursday. And it's hard, right? UX and SEO teams often operate independently of one another, and may make decisions that affect one another's work. Sometimes it's a "hindsight is 20/20" situation. Sometimes the answer is so radical and impactful that you may want to settle for a "safe" alternative. I'd imagine many of you have encountered some big issues with user experience and search optimization in your day-to-day over the years. What's the most difficult situation you've encountered with this? How did you resolve it? (I'd bet money on there being some really creative solutions out there :). Is there a particularly challenging situation you're struggling with now that you'd want to share & crowdsource ideas for?
Web Design | | FeliciaCrawford3 -
301 Redirect from Old Domain to New Domain
I am building a new website and I plan to 301 Redirect my Old Domain (olddomain.com) to a brand new Domain (newdomain.com) in the upcoming months. To do this I was planning to update the htaccess file on both the old and new domains. The htaccess file on the old domain would look to 301 redirect all pages on the old domain to the new domain. The htaccess file on the new domain would detail any specific URL redirects I want to implement (ie. olddomain.com/EXAMPLE/TEST will redirect to newdomain/TEST) - this will ensure link equity is retained and bounce rates are kept at a lower level. Does this sound like the right approach? Also, what do I need to do with the old domain going forward? Do I need to keep this forever in order for the 301 redirect to work or can I eventually just forward the domain to the new one permanently?
Web Design | | DHS_SH0 -
Pagenation - Crawl Issue
Hi,
Web Design | | semvibe
We have a site with large number of products (6000 +) under each categories and so we have made a page under each category to list out all products (View all page), which lists out product in pagenation setup built on Ajax. The problem is only our 1st page is crawlable and all the other pages beyond 1st page remains hidden,
We need make all our pagenation URL’s crawlable, our requirements are we never want a change in URL as user goes to next page, want to show the user the same URL for all the pagenation numbers. Is there a perfect solution?0 -
How Does Google differentiate a keyword you are optimizing for and a non-keyword?
So, let's say that my company is called John's Business Consulting and I offer outsourced HR work (recruiting, evaluating, personality assessments, background checks). So for my home page I want "Business Consulting" to be my keyword that I want to rank for. But "recruiting services", "talent development" are all words that describe a service that I offer and could potential be keywords, how do I get Google to not dilute my authority for "business consulting"?
Web Design | | wlw20090 -
Old school HTML and rankings
How does really old school HTML (with inline CSS and a boat load of markup errors) affect modern SEO? I'm talking purely rankings, not conversions or bounce rate etc.
Web Design | | DavidWilsonSEO0 -
For a new business which would be the best domain name?
I'm starting a new business selling Whitby Jet and I want to buy the best domain name which will help me in the search engines, I want to use the keywords in the domain name because it think it will help when people link to the website, but whitbyjet.com and whitbyjet.co.uk have both been taken. I could be wrong I think .com is generally thought of as the best and I don't really like the idea of .net or .org So maybe I might have to choose the third word which tends to make the doamin a little bit longer like whitbyjetjewlery.co.uk. Any suggestions would be greatly received.
Web Design | | whitbycottages0 -
Two sites in same industry and which shopping cart
Right. So I suspect I am going to sound paranoid here - but you'll all forgive me right?? I am sure I saw a reply to a question on the Q&A suggesting that it was a bad idea to have two sites in one industry as Google may see it as trying to get two bites of the SERP cherry... is this accurate? I have an existing asp.net site in the maternity wear industry here in Australia and am wanting to start another site to appeal to a different customer base... the market is quite broad. There will be a core list of products that are the same between the sites, but also some quite different products. Content, product descriptions and categorys will be different. I have another website that I bought with reasonable age and links in the industry that I was going to 301 to the new site to give it a kick in the juice. So, not wanting to deceive my customers in anyway, I was thinking I would call it a "division of" or "sister site to" the existing ecommerce site, with a single link back and forward between the two sites. Would there be anything wrong with this in googles eyes? Even with same contact details? They would be run on totally different platforms and hosted by totally different providers. Or would you keep them totally seperate and only have contact details in images? Or a step further and have totally different phone numbers etc? Then the shopping cart - I would love some suggestions on which opensourse cart to use, preferrably one that I can set up myself, and that has a good framework for seo. I want to use schema.org, authorship, seo friendly urls all of which I am having trouble getting out of the developer of my asp.net site.... I don't want the new site to be asp.net Thanks in advance!!
Web Design | | catfree0