Cloaking for Religious Reasons

[Shimon]

I have friends who shutdown their ecommerce website every Friday afternoon to Saturday night for religious reasons. As orthodox jews they are forbidden to transact any business on the Sabbath. They don’t just disable the ecommerce piece on the shopping cart. The entire website shuts down. Similar to a butcher who hangs a sign on his store, “Out to Lunch”. I know of one other ecommerce site that does this also.

So, these guys asked me if shutting down their site hurts their SEO efforts. Like, if the Google spider comes to the site, and it is shutdown, does it hurt them. Answer; yes.

So, my thought is to use Cloaking during the period of shutdown. Anotherwords, if a human being comes to the site, they see the “Out to Lunch” sign. If a spider comes to the site, it can crawl the entire site. The site will be open to the spider, but not to humans. However, as we all know, cloaking is risky business.

This type of cloaking seems like it should be permitted because it is not being done to fool Google. It’s not spamming the engines.

But, before employing this SEO strategy, I think we need to get the approval ( or disapproval) of Google.

I wonder if Matt C. has ever had to deal with a situation like this?

Original post at: www.shimonsandler.com

[rustybrick]

Well, just like you are allowed special treatment for religious reasons, i.e. you can take standardized tests on sundays instead of saturdays in NY (I think), or you get kosher food on airlines, or you don't have to swear on a bible in court.... Why not special treatment for Google for Religious Reasons?

[Opie]

Although I have very limited knowledge of Judaism, I would have to disagree on this point. If you shut your site down for religious reasons then the site should be shut down for everyone... Even Mister Googlebot. Now - If Google adds an option to Webmaster Central to not have Googlebot come visit during certain time periods (religious reasons, heavy traffic, etc..) then I see no problem with that.

[rustybrick]

Good point Opie!

[gabs]

I like the idea..

Sort of a bit like "if it looks good its not spam"..

this brings up the topic of colour now..

My site is pink (trust me I have a pink site) google has an issue with my colour..

[JohnMoo]

Actually, Google has a way you can handle that without needing to cloak too much. Just return HTTP status code 503 to all requests.

If my site is down for maintenance, how can I tell Googlebot to come back later rather than to index the "down for maintenance" page?
You should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). That lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.

(from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...googlebot.html )

John

Edit: It works, I use it a lot. The other engines don't seem to mind either.

[rustybrick]

Awesome JohnMoo, the 503.

[JohnMoo]

Code 503 could be set for the "currently closed" page in general, it doesn't even have to be cloaked to Google. The normal visitor will not notice (I'm not sure how it will be handled through all types of proxy servers though... but it should be ok).

I use this code on a resource-hungry and slow database-driven site that takes a while to process requests. I cache all queries, and if Google (or any other search engine) tries to access a query that has not been cached, I return 503. On a separate machine I update the cache with a scheduler (when the load is low) and when Google retries the same query a day or so later, it will get the cached output. By doing that I know that the crawlers will not be able to create a "denial of service" situation and at the same time, they get whatever they would like (not right away, but soon enough).

Google will list the 5xx response codes as "errors" in the webmaster console, but since I know where they come from, it is not a problem. It does not seem to impact the general crawling of the website nor do I have any problems with ranking because of that.

John

[Wit]

Ummm, these people don't have to "transact any business" cuz they have a website to does that for them. I doubt that the website itself is religious.

IMHO this "issue" is a bit silly. Nice thread though: kudos for that

[rustybrick]

Originally Posted by Wit

Ummm, these people don't have to "transact any business" cuz they have a website to does that for them. I doubt that the website itself is religious.

IMHO this "issue" is a bit silly. Nice thread though: kudos for that

Wit, no matter how 'silly' one might find this, some people actually do this.

B&H is a pretty large store in NYC, and they do this.

But I would estimate 10 sites on the web might do this. So should Google bother with them?