Navigation for search
-
We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?
-
I would never recommend altering your site in any way specifically for a bot. Google has repeatedly stated that would be seen as cloaking and you definitely run the risk of a penalty. It can happen any time. Do you really want that cloud over your head?
Even if Amazon is able to do it, you are not Amazon. Despite any statement to the contrary, a huge site like Amazon can do things that you or I may not be able to do. We can debate the fairness of it, but we are not on a level playing field with them.
You seem to really want to do this, so feel free. But x months from now you will likely make a post "My rankings dropped and I can't figure out why", and then someone will notice the setting and that will be the answer.
-
Could you please share the site in question? we might be able to give a much more insightful thought
-
Thanks for your suggestion Alex!
-
All the content will be accessible through the sitemap which will be displayed in both versions (the user and the bot) version of the site. The only difference is the navigation will change from one version to another. It could be perceived as a gray area, even though we really are just making it more friendly to bots not trying to be deceptive at all.
-
And that should be okay if they see the content is the same between your normal version and the spider version, just a difference in presentation. It becomes a problem when you start serving drastically different content.
-
How about adding an indexable version of the navigation and then hiding it with CSS? The crawlers would see that. I haven't thought about whether that'd be a good idea, just a quick thought.
-
We usually operate under the principal that would this be ok if it were manually reviewed? In our plan, I am pretty confident that it would pass. We are planning on making what is displayed to bots very basic text link navigation. Our XML and html sitemaps will correspond well with the bot navigation (so to show G we really are not trying to hide anything). And yes we could make the nav more search friendly, but one of our main goals is to have the site look as clean as possible. As far as I can tell Amazon uses this method to avoid duplicate content issues and make their site generally more crawlable which is why I think it is on the table as an option.
-
Depending on how much you're changing, I think it could be considered cloaking and end up getting you in trouble. You'll get looked at any time you're sniffing for bots and serving up different content. Are there other ways you could make the navigation index-able?
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 the url inspection is disabled in search console ?
In this situation, how can we make our pages be fetched by google?
On-Page Optimization | | supporthandle0 -
What should I be shooting for for search visibility percentage?
Realistically - what's a "good" search visibility score? I'm working on a site that has been around less than a year. We are doing 3 blogs a week with carefully selected keywords. I know it will take time and lots of SEO work - but I'm interested in any ideas on what I should shoot for. Thanks for any thoughts! (Also not a local listing or anything - national search.)
On-Page Optimization | | mm19804 -
Snippet showing as domain name with apostrophe, instead of page title when searching for the domain name.
Hi, We have an issue with one of our websites, with the snippet dispaying differently in Google serps when searching for the domain or the website name rather than a search term. When searching for a search term, the page title shows as expected, but when searching for the site by the domain name either with or without the tld, it shows the snippet as the domain name with an apostrophe at the end. Domain is subli.co.uk Thanks in advance for any advice!
On-Page Optimization | | K3v1n0 -
Page title in Google search is defferent
Hello, Google changes the title of the main page only for my sites in this way: What I configured: My page title | my site name How it shows in Google: My site name: My page title If I checked some meta tags analyzer it will show my configured page title and also in Bing.com So what do you thing about it. Best Regards, Housam
On-Page Optimization | | anubis20 -
Any idea how Google is doing this? Is it schematic? http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/28/google-adds-full-restaurant-menus-to-its-search-results-pages/
Google is now showing menus on select searches. Any idea how they are getting this information? I would like to make sure my clients get visibility this way.
On-Page Optimization | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Please give me advice on how to get this page back into search engines
Hi. Before we had our site www.in2town.co.uk upgraded, we had this section on the first page of google and even though it does not badly with other search engines, with google we are not in the top fifty. the page is http://www.in2town.co.uk/gastric-band-hypnotherapy i would be so grateful for advice on how to get this section back into google i am also concerned that i have a category called gastric band hypnotherapy, what i mean is, http://www.in2town.co.uk/gastric-band-hypnotherapy/crash-diets-can-damage-your-health-says-gastric-band-hypnosis-expert as you can see from above, we have the category name which is gastric band hypnotherapy and then the article name, just wondering if this is damaging us. any help to sort our ranking issue our would be amazing
On-Page Optimization | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Navigation Links
Our developers typically have a CSS driven html menu at the top of the page with links to inside pages. They then have the same links in the footer. Does this double navigation cause any SEO issues or does Google disregard the second set of links? Thanks, Mark
On-Page Optimization | | DenverKelly0 -
Accessibility search
Hello there, One of the sites we do work for is a chain of care homes. We are in the process of adding a page reader so any visitors they have who are visually impaired will find it easier to access the info they need. We're doing this from a usability point of view more than anything (given their target audience), but while looking to see if there were any accessibility news sites /directories we could leverage for some links I came across mentions of the old Google Accessibility search. It seems to have been before my time as an SEO, so I wondered: is this still relevant, or has it just been assimilated into the regular algorithm (the only mentions I could find were very dated) if relevant and separate from the main search, are there many who use it what other things should we take into account when trying to optimise for this (assuming it's still relevant, of course) Cheers guys!
On-Page Optimization | | themegroup0