5 replies to this topic

[eteare]

When you first arrive on my site from a search engine, you will see what we call an "SEO" page. We give you the content, but do not include the "aaplication," the ajax driven search. A user is then cookied. On the second pageview a user sees our page with a full search application. From then on the URL is dynamic.

Now, if you have been cookied by my site and you do a search and one of our pages comes up and you click on it, the page you get will have a different URL than the one listed in Google. This is cloaking. But not nefarious! It's sort of due to the Ajax. What's a girl to do? How can we communicate with Google that we are not doing this for bad? What do other sites do that build pages dynamically but want static pages that can be indexed by google?

[chrishirst]

Nope!

Cloaking is showing different content to search engines, if the content is the same with or without cookies there is no cloaking.

[Alan Perkins]

As long as when they click through to a URL on your site from a Google SERP the searcher sees what Googlebot saw when it crawled that URL, there's no way that can be called cloaking.

Once the searcher starts seeing different things on the landing page to that which Googlebot saw, you may have issues. But AFAICT from your description, that isn't the case.

[eteare]

The URL changes and we actually give you additional content. We do this to limit damage from scrapers. What do you think?

[Alan Perkins]

Sounds OK. However, if you want to be sure, implement something like the following logic:

CODE

if (referrer == search engine) or (no cookie set) then
  show default content
  set cookie
else
   redirect to additional content
end if

[eteare]

Sounds OK. However, if you want to be sure, implement something like the following logic:

CODE

if (referrer == search engine) or (no cookie set) then
  show default content
  set cookie
else
   redirect to additional content
end if

That was TOTALLY the solution I came up with. I am so thrilled to see you agree!!!