: Can referrer-based web page content be SEO friendly? Basically, I am going to be using the page referrer to display different content on a given page. It won't be the entire page depending

@Nimeshi995

Well, I would like to tell you that Google gives credit to Niche content & niche pages. Becaue today's era Google work according to user search query. Like if user is looking for lions on search then Google will only find the exact information on the search, if you have the information about bears & lions on the same page then It will completely ignore your page & it will give preference to the exact match page who have the only Lions on the same page.

I hope you got an idea

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@Heady270

The only way that Google knows your page is about bears is that you give it content about bears when it crawls the page. When Google crawls the page, you have to choose whether it is about bears or lions. Then Google ranks the page for the appropriate term. When Googlebot crawls, it doesn't send a referrer, so you can't make the decisions based on the referrer for the crawler.

If you have content about bears and other content about lions, it is best for SEO to put them on two different pages.

The other problem with using the referrer from Google to power your site is "not provided" keywords. Google doesn't send a referrer with keyword in it most of the time nowdays. For most searchers, you wouldn't know if they had searched for bears or lions.

I have code in one of my sites that tries to direct users to the correct page based on their search term. I'll put a notice like this up:


I see you searched for "lions" but this page is mostly about "bears". Click here to read about lions.


The site works this way because there were a bunch of cases where Google was ranking the wrong page. Google has since improved and usually ranks the correct page on my site nowdays, so I'm not very upset that the "not provided" makes it useless.

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@Ann8826881

It sounds like you are on dangerous grounds.

I assume that Googlebot will always get the same page since, according to your example, there is no search involved. But please do know that Google checks pages using domain names, IP addresses and agents other than Google's own to validate that a page is not cloaked.

What you are describing falls within the cloak category.

It is always bad practice to display different content to a user than a search engine and it is likely a bad idea to do what you are describing.

Do I think there is an SEO factor in all this? Yes. Penalty.

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