What are the SEO recommendations for dynamic, personalised page content? (not e-commerce)

[Gyorgy.B]

Hi,

We will have pages on the website that will display different page copy and images for different user personas. The main content (copy, headings, images) will be supplied dynamically and I'm not sure how Google will index the B and C variations of these pages.

As far as I know, the page URL won't change and won't have parameters.

Google will crawl and index the page content that comes from JavaScript but I don't know which version of the page copy the search robot will index. If we set user agent filters and serve the default page copy to search robots, we might risk having a cloak penalty because users get different content than search robots.

Is it better to have URL parameters for version B and C of the content? For example:

• /page for the default content
• /page?id=2 for the B version
• /page?id=3 for the C version

The dynamic content comes from the server side, so not all pages copy variations are in the default HTML.

I hope my questions make sense. I couldn't find recommendations for this kind of SEO issue.

[BritneyMuller]

Fascinating question Gyorgy!

I've always been a big fan of dynamic targeting.

It would be a great idea to have different URL parameters for each unique set of content. You might also want to push these pages to fetch & index within Google Search Console (and your sitemap.xml to showcase you're not attempting to cloak, etc.)

This would be a fantastic question for Google reps...I can try to reach out to someone today and let you know what they say.

Cheers,

B

PS. Just curious, how are you pulling in persona data?

[BritneyMuller]

Did some digging and found a few resources stating:

Googlehadan official statement about this in its webmaster guidelines:
"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a ? character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Don't use &id= as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."

That was many years ago but more recently Google changed its position on that subject. The entry has been removed from Google's guidelines but here's the official statement from Google's blog:
"Google now indexes URLs that contain the &id= parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may still be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."

Click here read the full article

Penalization for personalisation

Let me know if this helps

[Gyorgy.B]

Hi Britney

Thank you for your detailed feedback!

I checked the posts you linked and a few other sources and I think the solution will be the following:

• The default content will be loaded with the parameter free URL, e.g. /product
• Personalised versions of the page will have different (short) parameters, e.g. /product?version=8372762
• The default and the personalised pages will have the same canonical tag (default page)
• Let Google know in the Search Console's URL Parameters settings that the version parameter changes the page content (specifies + let Googlebot decide)

I hope it makes sense.

[BritneyMuller]

Yes, that sounds great! Please let me know how it all goes and if you run into any other hiccups.

Cheers,

B

[Slumberjac]

Brilliant thread guys!

This will be far more discussed in the not so distant future i'm sure!

Dynamic Homepages are becoming more common and I have a client using one so this info has really helped me.

This topic should be a future Whiteboard Friday.

[unirmk]

Hi everyone,

I have a related question about personalisation too which is a variation on the theme but which I would appreciate some help with.

There is a project afoot within my company to "personalise" the user experience by presenting pages to users which better respond to their interests.

That is to say that, when a user visits our page about "tennis-shoes", the next time they visit the homepage they will be presented with a homepage which focusses on tennis-shoes.

So far so good.

However rather than personalising certain elements of the homepage, the idea is to intercept those users, and 301 them to an entirely different URL, completly hidden from Google, which will contain entirely different content focussing only on shoes.

The top navegation will remain the same.

This sounds like a massive breach of Quality Guidelines on at least two counts to me. It reeks of cloacking and "sneaky redirects", and I am very concerned this will do us way more harm than good.

I'm guessing that the correct way of going about this would be to either generate a great "shoes" page and allow users to navigate to it, visit it, and do whatever they want with it, or to personalise the homepage including some dynamic elements on the same URL, without hiding things from Google or frustrating users by not allowing them to access the page they are trying to access.

Any feedback from the community would be a great help.

Thanks a lot!