Victor Pan - When is cloaking a good idea?

Transcript

1. Victor Pan When is cloaking a good idea?
2. Cloaking is never a good idea Thank you for coming
3. What I’m about to tell you… Never happened 😉
4. Trivia Time! *Side-effects of cloaking include lost website rankings, organic traffic, a manual penalty, difficulty sleeping at night, nightmares , anxiety, depression, and spying on how other people search on Google. Which two countries allow for medical ads? Cloaking Improves SEO*
5. Important Cloaking Disclaimer* *This deck was meant for an audience of SEO’s with 10+ years of experience Cloaking Sanity Check Is this a good idea? I have a long-term technical team Yes/Maybe The SEO & admins are part-time No If you document changes others in your company will care Yes/Maybe You don’t know how to handle, maintain, and test IP-cloaking to search engines No I am aware of the risks of cloaking includes losing traffic and revenue that could put people I care about at risk. Maybe
6. User-agent:* Disallow: / Victor Pan (He/Him/先生） • Does weird things at a B2B SaaS company that tracks traffic to $ • Cares about making the web a better place • My favorite human condition is awkward tension
7. Cloaking un-agenda Disclaimer & intro GDPR & the cookiepocolypse How adding parameters within internal links broke Google When cloaking becomes a solution When is cloaking a good idea? 04 MIN 05 MIN 06 MIN 07 MIN 08 MIN
8. A long time ago… signing up =/= consent Data granularity will only get worse
9. E.g. Creating an account doesn’t count as consent. Didn’t accept cookie consent? You’re a direct conversion.
10. How much GDPR exposure does your website have from EU citizens? Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Ireland Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malta The Netherlands Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden *United Kingdom I’ll save you some time. Don’t use GSC Search Analytics to quantify this. *Passed GDPR before leaving the EU
11. Cumulative GDPR Fines* Source: GDPR Enforcement Tracker Report *Obligatory I am not a lawyer disclaimer
12. Guess the country with the highest cookie consent rejection rate. Over half of visitors rejected consent
13. Conversions Source? ‘Not Provided’ AI can solve all of humanity’s problems…
14. Google AI can model data and therefore conversions When the model improves, will it backdate?
15. Apple introduces Intelligent Tracking Protection for iOS. 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection Chrome declares they’ll be phasing out 3rd party cookies Chrome introduces Privacy Sandbox breakthroughs Google shifts stance on fully killing 3rd party cookies in July Appendix: Cookiepocolypse Timeline (Most internet users use Chrome) Don’t sit on this. It’s coming.
16. What actually happened. A last-touch attribution script in JS. What could go wrong?
17. Appendix: What could you do different? What could go wrong? • Use # (hash, anchors) provided it doesn’t conflict with your analytics backend • Unify to one parameter where event combinations are encoded • Server-side/hybrid analytics using first-party data only • …and much more.
18. The business of B2B SaaS SEO 1 Paying Customers $$$ (Customer Lifetime Value) 3 Channel Conversion Rate (hubs_signup-cta) 5 Search Total Addressable Market (Topics -> Products) 2 Leads/Demos/Free Sign-ups CVR (estimated $) 4 Feasible Market Share by CTR (hubs_signup-url) You need numbers to build or expand an SEO team
19. Mathing influence 1 If we assume $1000 value for a customer, $1M* 3 Channel Conversion Rate (1%)* 5 Search Total Addressable Market (100M/M)* 2 Book Demo->Paid Customer CVR (10%)* 4 Feasible Market Share by CTR (1%)* *Numbers/channels simplified, but this is how headcount/a bonus/promotion could math out.
20. What could go wrong with adding parameters to internal links? I’ll believe Gary when it’s in the help docs
21. What could go wrong? More crawl = better rankings right? Cctlds were also impacted negatively
22. What could go wrong? Part II Our kafka swimlane may have been shared with customers
23. What could go wrong? Part III Sites that are still “polluted” with duplicate content from our parameters
24. Fixing things (short term) because we wanted to maximize Page Rank We get around 300+ parameters. Based on log files, the parameter handling tool was not effective
25. The bigger fix - block javascript and parameters that don’t impact render iplookup is used for personalization and returns an X-robots-tag: none
26. Duplicates - From 200:1 to 20:1 Big win on technical SEO debt, but still room for improvement…
27. Small difference, but this is still technically cloaking Person sees Bots see No, we did not get a manual penalty from doing this
28. Why stop here? *Let’s chat if you’ve already done this • Users don’t need schema, OG, and other metadata for bots • Bots don’t execute non-rendering scripts (ad tracking, heatmaps, tag manager) • 301 redirect parameterizations to canonical via CDN dynamic redirect rules*
29. Appendix: Dumb Cloudflare Dynamic Redirect Example Example Cloudflare dynamic redirect rule that would 301 redirect all parameterizations non-param. This would ruin a site where ?page=N is used for pagination. Do your own SEO due diligence.
30. Cloaking may be good idea when* *Disclaimer: Caveat Emptor • What you’re serving users is essentially the same as search engines (in spirit) • You can get some credit for reducing bytes on the wire ◦ this could be reduced server costs ◦ or a sustainability effort where you work • It’s not cloaking, it’s personalization
31. The more data Googlebot is downloading, the more room for improvement?* *Screenshot intentionally given without context. What comes after T? Q/S/G?
32. Fuck yeah. Tech SEO solving for global warming with make-believe trees h/t Arnout. Crawls X bytes not rendered X trees saved = tree hugging tech SEO math Websitecarbon.com
33. Why have browsers resize images when you can serve it on the edge? h/t Jono I’m a huge fan of brotli compression and not resizing images
34. Cloaking* *This is a doctored screenshot
35. Call-to-Action - gotta’ have one *If you’re cloaking for good, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s make robots.txt cloaking official for starters. fucking great idea!!! *
36. Thank you