Hi Ydop,

You might be able to get away with a modal pop up without AdWords noticing, but I think that it does violate Google's policy in spirit, since Google says "Google does not allow pop ups of any kind when entering or leaving your landing page." (Bolding for emphasis) Even though they're talking about separate windows, the experience is the same for the user. In fact, sometimes it's more frustrating, since modal pop ups are often harder to close.

That said, your intent is fine, I just think that you need to use a different solution to introduce your company on your inventory page. You said that you want to use a pop up to tell AdWords visitors that your inventory page is full of hand-crafted furniture, but why can't you include that message at the top of the page? Especially if it's a core value of your business, visitors who started on the homepage won't mind being reminded about the quality of your work. And it will help visitors who land on that inventory page through search or referral links as well as AdWords visitors.

As a consultant, I push my clients to make every page include enough information that it can be a landing page. With Google trying to place visitors on the most specifically relevant page possible, and referring links out of your control, you never know where visitors will start on your website. Don't assume that visitors will start on your homepage, or that will begin their journey through your site understanding your business.

Good luck!

Kristina

How is this going? Did you solve the problem?

One quick note: if you can't find a link to the IP address on your site (or, a link to a broken link or an old domain), run a Screaming Frog or Xenu crawl and look at all external links. There's probably a surprise footer link or something like that that's causing the problem, and it'd be easy to miss manually. But tools find all!

Good luck.

Hi,

CleverPhD has some interesting ideas with robots.txt and Google Webmaster Tools, but simply password protecting all dev pages should keep pages out of Google's index. There's no best practice here, since a password wall will keep Googlebot out on its own.

To be doubly safe, you can also include a meta noindex tag on dev pages.

Keep in mind that once a page is in Google's index, it's going to take awhile for it to leave (unless you use CleverPhD's method). But, having a blank page in Google's index really isn't all that bad. It's there, but it won't rank for much.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

I've never tried a method like this - FreshFireOne, did you?

I've responded to specific comments below, but here's the information you need to redirect: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

The gist is, you need:

• 301 or 302 redirects from the desktop site to the mobile site, based on user agent detection
• Rel="canonical" tag on each mobile page pointing to to each desktop page
• Rel="alternate" tag on each desktop page pointing to each mobile page
• A Vary HTTP header
• A mobile sitemap

As I mentioned below, I also recommend that you have a link at the bottom of the mobile and desktop sites pointing to the other version. That way, if you get the redirects wrong, people can self correct.

I disagree with Lesley, saying that you should just ask. I would recommend that you redirect to the mobile version of the the site, then ask. Basically: get people onto the page that you're 90% sure they want to be on, but let them switch back and forth. Just add a link to the footer of the deskop and mobile sites letting people switch between the two.

He's correct about redirecting to the right page, though. Don't redirect all of your desktop pages to the mobile homepage. When Google ranks your desktop pages on mobile search results, it checks out the redirect to mobile content. If the mobile content isn't similar, the page won't rank in mobile.

The best way to handle redirects is to use a 301 or 302 redirect (this is probably the only time in SEO that either gives the same result) based on user agent detection.

Is that enough detail?

Inline scripts aren't bad per se, search engines just can't always understand them. Worst case scenario: you have extra code that Google has to crawl but doesn't understand, which takes up bandwidth and doesn't add value. But, it won't lower your rankings.

So, do whatever you need to do to deliver the best user experience you can on your site with this map and related route, and figure that Google will ignore it (Google is trying to understand it, though, so it may be helpful in the long run). Then, for search engines, include some text content describing the map and the route so that search engines can send the right searchers to your page.

Good luck!

Kristina