During the SMX Toronto conference I asked former Googler Vanessa Fox and technical SEO Jonathan Hochman about a recent point made by my good buddy Chris Silver Smith regarding the issue that phone call tracking on a website maybe considered cloaking. The unanimous response was that since we are showing the same content to a user who is not using cookies as we show to the search engines AND the intent is good, this is not cloaking.
This is an issue that Chris brought up recently in his article and had me a bit concerned. I am now considering this resolved and kosher. If you’d like you can follow our how-to article on how to set up your own call tracking solution on the cheap!
About Mike Belasco
Mike has been honing his internet skills since the early 90s, in both corporate and start up environments. Today, Mike’s companies, seOverflow and ConversionIQ, make Search Engine and Conversion Optimization available and affordable to companies of all sizes.
The issue I was speaking to was more to do with those solutions which were doing: user-agent detection to deliver different content to search engine spiders, obscuring main phone numbers with image overlays of tracking numbers, or using Javascript to rewrite phone numbers dynamically.
Some of the top solution providers have done outright cloaking, while others have done very naive solutions in the mistaken believe that Google cannot read text from images nor interpret Flash/Javascript/AJAX.
The issue was never with cookied differences in content delivery. Some of the people who commented on the post even brought up registered/logged-in users versus non-logged — but, that was never an issue.
The intent itself has actually been worth questioning with a number of the solutions out there as well. Merely using an alternative phone number for tracking purposes is no problem — but, the solutions which have been advertising that they provide SEO by cloaking phone numbers is a bit of a prob, since Google states that you shouldn’t be hiding text for purposes of optimization. That’s clearly a no-no.
I can see, though, that it would’ve been good if I’d specifically spoken to cookies and/or being logged-in versus non-logged in that original article. Some of the tracking companies out there really didn’t get the nuance, as shown when at least one of the commenters tried to compare my criticism with newspapers and other sites which display different content to logged-in users.
Thanks for clarifying Chris, you had us a little worried for a bit!