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Hiding ad code from bots
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Hi. I have a client who is about to deploy ads on their site. To avoid bots clicking on those ads and skewing data, the company would like to prevent any bots from seeing any ads and, of course, that includes Googlebot. This seems like it could be cloaking and I'd rather not have a different version of the sites for bots. However, knowing that this will likely happen, I'm wondering how big of a problem it could be if they do this. This change isn't done to manipulate Googlebot's understanding of the page (ads don't affect rankings, etc.) and it will only be a very minimal impact on the page overall.
So, if they go down this road and hide ads from bots, I'm trying to determine how big of a risk this could be. I found some old articles discussing this with some suggesting it was a problem and others saying it might be okay in some cases (links below). But I couldn't find any recent articles about this. Wondering if anybody has seen anything new or has a new perspective to share on this issue? Is it a problem if all bots (including Googlebot) are unable to see ads?
https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4535445.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBO-1ETf_dY -
Hello Mathew Edgar,
To make it simple for you, we give you few steps here to implement in your client's website that could results in possibilities of no penalty from search engines [ especially from Google ]
1. keep the content & URL unique from other pages
2. Avoid flash or scripts that makes the web-page to load slower
3. Try to keep ONLY 3 - 5 Ads [ max of text based with low portion of images ] maximum in the web-page
4. Do not OPTIMIZE the page i.e., for keywords rankings, organic results, back-links etc
5. Give the images Name & ALT Text for easier crawling
Also usually Bots just crawl a web-page / domain instead making clicks. Bots only make sure that the page is crawl-able with search engine [ Google ] guidelines.
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