Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Log in, sign up, user registration and robots
-
Hi all,
We have an accommodation site that asks users only to register when they want to book a room, in the last step. Though this is the ideal situation when you have tons of users, nowadays we are having around 1500 - 2000 per day and making tests we found out that if we ask for a registration (simple, 1 click FB) we mail them all and through a good customer service we are increasing our sales.
That is why, we would like to ask users to register right after the home page ie Home/accommodation or and all the rest. I am not sure how can I make to make that content still visible to robots.
Will the authentication process block google crawling it? Maybe something we can do?We are not completely sure how to proceed so any tip would be appreciated.
Thank you all for answering.
-
For implementing early user registration without hindering SEO, consider using dynamic rendering to serve content to Google’s crawlers; this method can maintain visibility while capturing user details upfront. For more tailored strategies, consult with experts at First Growth Agency.
-
The registration process on most websites is pretty straightforward. You enter your email, you create a password, and then you are done with it. Also try instagram mod apk unlimited likes and followers.
-
-
-
Yes it is better to ask the users to register right after the homepage but it will take some time that is the main reason you should apply some different tactics.
-
Just to give you un update, our IT solved that with CSS. The code is visible but it appears a CSS login over that does not really allow you to see much more until you log in.
It is working.
-
Correct. If you have a wall Googlebot won't index it unless you make some sort of exception for it (and even then Google frowns on walled off content). SEM had great article on this talking about Google's rules for walled news content (may not apply to you but interesting nonetheless).
I would put your wall behind your content, not in front.
-
Thank you Highland for the answer.
Therefore, I understand that there is not any way for robots to pass where there autentification requirements. Right? Just to confirm. This is our main concern, we get 30% of our SEO results directly to rooms and we would not like to loose those.
We already made the A/B tests and check the conversion rates and though we know we are loosing some users and making bounce higher the sales rates are much higher (about 30%).
We are working to solve this as well improving the product and the site but that would be other completely different thing.Seems like making a decission where to ask to register is the real important thing then

-
You can go this route easily enough, it just requires a deliberate decision as to which is public and which is behind your login-wall. Put a different way, you're going to need some public pages that explain your site, how the process works, etc. Once you've established what is necessary from a user and SEO perspective, then you can wall off your content behind a login.
You also need to experiment some with your funnel. If you present your wall on the first page after the home page, is that going to drive conversions (registrations in this case) up or down? Maybe your users are reading 3-4 pages before registering. Where is the sweet spot? A-B test. Funnel test. Be careful that you don't go "Hey, registrations increased sales so we need everyone to register!" because you might hurt sales down the road if less people register.
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
-
Will properly encoded & signs hurt or help me?
Hello friends, Will properly encoding a url hurt my ranking after having it improperly coded? I want to change my & symbols to & If I go from:
Technical SEO | | sonic22
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool To:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool Will I get hurt if I make the leap?0 -
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
Technical SEO | | Nomader1 -
Robots.txt Tester - syntax not understood
I've looked in the robots.txt Tester and I can see 3 warnings: There is a 'syntax not understood' warning for each of these. XML Sitemaps:
Technical SEO | | JamesHancocks1
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml How do I fix or reformat these to remove the warnings? Many thanks in advance.
Jim0 -
Robots.txt in subfolders and hreflang issues
A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
Technical SEO | | lauralou82
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt We've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US. They have the following hreflang tags across all pages: We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously). Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all. Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location. Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?0 -
Ranking penalty for "accordion" content -- hidden prior to user interaction
Will content inside an "accordion" module be ranked as non-hidden content? Is there an official guide by google and other search engines addressing this? Example of accordion element: https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/collapse/#accordion-example Will all elements in the example above be seen + treated equally by search engines?
Technical SEO | | houlihanlokey1 -
Google indexing despite robots.txt block
Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Invisible robots.txt?
So here's a weird one... Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com" So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK! But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before. Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | joshcanhelp0