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.
301 Redirect & Cloaking
-
HEllo~~~~ People.
I have a question regarding on cloaking.
I will be really greatful if you can help me with question.
I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries.
So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries.
e.g. www.example.com/us/
www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on.
Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries.
Here is my question.
I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com,
my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect.
In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking?
Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
-
Artience Girl, the information shared by Shane, Aaron and Lewis is correct.
Google wants to see the same page as it would be shown to a user under the same circumstances. If Google is crawling your page from San Jose California, then they want to see what a user from San Jose would see. If they decide to later crawl your site from their center in London, they want to see your site as it would be seen by a London user. The geo-targeting redirects you are presently doing are fine.
If you were to write any code which says to always show the Google crawler the US version of your site, then that tactic would be defined as cloaking. Any time you write code to specifically identify a crawler and show it different content, then you are cloaking.
It seems you are a bit uncomfortable with the answers so let me set you at ease by sharing a Matt Cutts response to your question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw
-
Hi Shane Thomas.
Thanks for your feedback.
Actually contents is not exactly same, but alot similar. Because I sell different products for different countries.
For example, I sell 30 products for US but only 10 products for UK. In this case, my UK site has only pages for 10 products. Of course, contents lay out and products are similar.
In this case, should I worry about cloaking?
Also, how search engine can see "intent is not deceptive or not"?
I always wondering about that. ^^
-
Hello, Lewis-SEO. Thanks for your reply, but I am not totally following your answer.
What do you mean by "Google only version of the site"?
You mentioned as follow.
"You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL"
Is this meaning that I should set "user agent redirection" for Google bot to send it to particular regional site? e.g. send Google bot to only www.example.com/us/ no matter which country IP address Google bot has?
Please correct me, if I am wrong. But this sounds more cloacking to me.
Google bot with DE IP address should redirect to www.example.com/de/ so google bot can crawl right contents. And when Google bot with UK IP addres should redirect to www.example.com/uk/.
I think if I send alll Google bot to www.example.com/us/ for example, it will confuse google bot more.
Could you please be more specific regarding your answer? PLEASE ~~~
-
Hi Artience Girl
The Google Webmaster guidelines covers topics like these but a key point is that geotargetting using IP address is fine as long as you are not showing Google a separate Google only version of the site. This would be considered cloaking.
You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL
But before you do that check the Google Webmaster guidelines in and around this area as if you follow them you are less likely to end up on the wrong side of them.
Hope this helps.
-
This really does not fit the description of cloaking, the content is the same, just different languages right?
If this is the case IMO this would not bee seen as cloaking as your are not delivering different content, just user experience.
Also as long as you are not separating IP delivery by source (meaning sending spiders somewhere different than humans) this would not be the definition of cloaking.
WIKI:
One use of IP delivery is to determine the requestor's location, and deliver content specifically written for that country. This isn't necessarily cloaking. For instance, Google uses IP delivery for AdWords and AdSense advertising programs to target users in different geographic locations.
As of 2006, many sites have taken up IP delivery to personalise content for their regular customers. Many of the top 1000 sites, including sites like Amazon (amazon.com), actively use IP delivery. None of these have been banned from search engines **as their intent is not deceptive. ** Keyword here..... Deceptive
-
I don't think this would come across as cloaking at all. It's a fairly common practice.
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
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
301 redirect syntax for htaccess
I'm working on some htaccess redirects for a few stray pages and have come across a few different varieties of 301s that are confusing me a bit....Most sources suggest: Redirect 301 /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html or using some combination of: RewriteRule + RewriteCond + RegEx I've also found examples of: RedirectPermanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html I'm confused because our current htaccess file has quite a few (working) redirects that look like this: Redirect permanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html This syntax seems to work, but I'm yet to find another Redirect permanent in the wild, only examples of Redirect 301 or RedirectPermanent Is there any difference between these? Would I benefit at all from replacing Redirect permanent with Redirect 301?
Technical SEO | | SamKlep1 -
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.
Technical SEO | | ztalk1120 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
Can you do a 301 redirect without a hosting account?
Trying to retire domain1 and 301 it to domain2 - just don't want to get stuck having to pay the old hosting provider simply to serve a .htaccess file with the redirect rule.
Technical SEO | | TitanDigital0 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
A script to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess?
I was wondering if anyone could help provide some resources on how to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess. Allow me to explain... I'm building a new website and the primary users are businesses. They have their own profile pages on the site. The URL is based off of their Company Name. In the event that they decided to change their name... reasons being, perhaps they mispelled it the first time, or they're removing LLC or adding Inc, I want to also change the URL and redirect the old URL to the new URL. Since the URL is based off of their Company Name, making a change to the company name would make a change to the URL. I know it doesn't have to work this way, but for our purpose this works best. In case the old URL had any links to it, I wanted to see if there was an way to automatically update an htaccess file with a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Could anyone point me in the right direction of how to do this? Perhaps a sample script. I've done a lot of searches on Google and can't seem to find anything. e.g. Original:
Technical SEO | | bimmer540
Name: XYZ Widgets
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets New - business changes their company name in their profile:
Name: XYZ Widgets, Inc.
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets-inc Upon the user saving the changes in their profile, I'd like to write a 301 redirect to an htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /xyz-widgets http://www.website.com/xyz-widgets-inc I know how to manually write redirects and I've got a pretty smart web developer. We've just never triggered a script to automatically write to an htaccess file before. Is this possible? Any resources are appreciated. Any security risks? Thanks!0