Will my redirect script upset Google?

[superclown2]

For a while I've been bothered about people coming from search engines and landing on the wrong pages on my site, search engines are not perfect after all and many people simply don't read what is printed in the SERPs anyhow! So, I've put a little php script in which analyses the search term for certain key words and then redirects to the page more relevant for that keyword. Nifty, eh! However the big question is; how will the search engines view this? Will they even know? Should I block access to the script from them with robots.txt? All advice gratefully received.

[tedster]

Since googlebot does not offer a referer, regular spidering would not trigger your script. Trouble might come during some the "special spidering" and manual, human inspection that Google does.

[superclown2]

Thanks for your thoughts Tedster. Would a human inspector object if the visitor's experience was enhanced by taking him/her to a page containing a copy of the relevant content with the irrelevant part removed I wonder? Do you know if there is any sort of guidance coming down from Google on this point or is all redirection considered to be evil?

[Robert Charlton]

Both Google Webmaster Central and Matt Cutts have talked about "sneaky javascript redirects"....

Google discusses various issues here...

Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages [google.com]

Here's the Matt Cutts discussion...

SEO Mistakes: sneaky JavaScript
[mattcutts.com...]

I don't think they much care how you do the redirect, or whether you use noscript, a nice redirected doorway page, or a crappy one. I think they don't like the user not getting the page that Google displayed in the serps.

[tedster]

I can't imagine Google being pleased with redirecting a url that's in their search results if they discover it. If Google lists a url in the SERPs, then they want that url to be the page that is displayed when the end user clicks.

Google takes many things into account that your script cannot - including personal search history, immediately previous queries and so on. And yes, they still often don't list the best page for the search phrase.

I think scripting a redirect like this is playing with fire. It might well be considered deceptive, even if you're only redirecting to what you consider to be a more appropriate page. I do understand the temptation, but I would not suggest doing this.

[Robert Charlton]

PS to the above. This kind of keyword-specific redirect might well take a competitor's report to trigger an inspection, though perhaps Toolbar data might be sufficient to flag it.

[superclown2]

Thank you to all for your very valuable comments. I recall some time ago that show/hide divs was acceptable to Google and this may be a better approach. Does anyone know what the latest feelings are about this? A competitor complaint could flag this too, but what would G's response be I wonder?

[Robert Charlton]

I think show/hide divs would be acceptable if the showing and hiding is done by the site visitor, not by a script based on the query.