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Background

We are in the process of launching a website where ticket inventory and processing are handled by a third party. Our primary means of traffic generation (at least at first) will be through SEO traffic.

One of the things that they require of us is a script that will detect people with an iPhone and, upon entering the site, display a page giving people the option to call for help or continue to the site. (see attached screenshot)

We will still get credit for the transaction (tracked through the phone #) and they say that this increases conversion rate, so it is something that we would like to use, unless it will affect our ability to rank in mobile.

Problem

My concern is that we will be penalized by Google (or rank poorly in Mobile search) because the page that iPhone users (not iPad users) are served is hosted on a different domain and not optimized at all for the keywords people are searching for. This is obviously a non-issue if Google never sees the page, but I have heard that Google will emulate different devices when crawling pages.

Question

Can anyone provide any insight about this? I feel like we are adding value to customers by giving them the option to speak to customer support, but I'm afraid that Google will think we are cloaking or at best providing the same page to anyone entering with an iPhone. Here is a link to the soon-to-be-launched website:http://dev.concerttickets.com.vhost.zerolag.com/ -- so you can check it out on your iPhone.

Is there a possibility that this could effect SEO traffic from other devices?

Any suggests will or advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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I am working with a site that is using the Cloudflare CDN to deliver their images. The problem is that the URLs for the images are all cloudflare URLs (cloudflare.com/example-filename.png). We want to use a cname to change the image URLs to be on a subdomain of their site to take advantage of the SEO strength.

Currently, they get a high percentage of traffic from image search and Google is directing users to their site when returning images hosted on Cloudflare, so I am apprehensive about making changes. I'm curious if anyone has any experience with this or has any insight on how Google will handle it.

Will the longer term benefits out way any short term drop in traffic from image search? WIll there be a drop in image search?

Any thoughts or experiences are appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the response. I agree with you that this feels wrong and I don't recommend anyone try this (unless you have a site that you don't mind using as a guinea pig).

The problem is that, if this is your home page or a strong category page with many legitimate links, rankings, ect., it will be tough to abandon the page altogether.

To follow up about the original idea, I have done some additional research and found a few mentions, though none of them exceptionally credible, of the fact that the Googlebot does not pass referrer data to the server. Can anyone confirm?

I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why.

Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed.

After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link.

I think there are two parts to the conversation...

1. Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site?

2. If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites.

Thoughts?