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Cloaking Spotify com violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines

Johannes Beus (Author) 07.11.2016The domain Spotify.com has massively lost visibility worldwide on Google. The country with the largest loss is France (-82,1%) and the country with the smallest impact are the Netherlands (-44.5%). In the United Kingdom Spotify lost 48% of all their keywords (from 92,588 to 59,102) and 71% of their Visibility on Google.co.uk. Starting our search for answers, we quickly find that the hostname open.spotify.com was responsible for the largest amount of visibility for Spotify.com and shows the highest losses now: List of the hostnames on Spotify.comIf we dig deeper in our analysis and take a look at the directories on open.spotify.com, we can see that all of them lost Visibility on Google: Directories of the open.spotify.com hostnameNow, that we have identified where the problem is, we need to figure out what exactly happened to the domain. If you click on the small box in front of any of the individual URLs for open.spotify.com/artist/, you will discover what is going on here. For the keyword “National Philharmonic Orchestra”, for example, Spotify.com ranks with this URL: open.spotify.com/artist/2Ek1WGW7WeyDoxsZiu0AAd. If you click on this URL or the corresponding Google search result, you will be redirected to another ULR on play.spotify.com/artist/ like this one: Snippet for Spotify.com on Google.co.ukThere is no real content on this URL and the user is forced to sign up to in order to see what they came for. If you look at the cached version of the same ULR on Google, you will notice that this version contains the actual content of the page. This discrepancy between what an actual user sees and what Google got (and saved in their cache) is the real problem here. Google’s cache for this URLThe user and search engine are shown different versions of the page. This strategy is known as cloaking and, as Google explains, “Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected“, which led to Spotify losing their rankings. I keep my fingers crossed and hope that Spotify will fix this problem soon. Have a nice start into the new week! Johannes Beus (Author) 07.11.2016Related posts Introducing: TrendWatch, the SISTRIX Data Journalism Team, and a Podcast We enjoy very positive feedback on our Blog content with case studies and data studies the most popular so, to that end,... Steve Paine4. January 2022 SectorWatch: Exposing the Real Competitors in UK Online Grocery Delivery As home delivery and fast-track grocery delivery services come-of-age, competition in the grocery retail sector increases.... Steve Paine3. November 2021 Nerdwallet to go public – The $5bn SEO Project Founded in 2009, Nerdwallet.com is now aiming for an IPO. Speculation is that the company could launch with a valuation... Johannes Beus27. October 2021 German English Spanish Italian French