See What Googlebot Sees On Your Site

Oct 13, 2009 at 4:01pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Google Webmaster Tools has just launched a "labs" section, where you'll find new features that may be early in the development cycle and not quite as robust as the rest of the tools. The features available so far are Fetch as Googlebot, which lets you see exactly what Googlebot is served when it requests a URL from your server and Malware Details, which shows you malicious code snippets from your site if it's been flagged as containing malware. Fetch as Googlebot Of most interest to webmasters, SEOs, and web developers is likely the Fetch as Googlebot feature. You can specify any URL on [...]

Filed in: Google: Webmaster Central, SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages, SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites

Google’s First Click Free Program For Web Content, Not Just News

Oct 17, 2008 at 1:56pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's long had a "First Click Free" program that allows news publishers to make their content accessible to search spiders but requires human visitors to login if they've already viewed one page on the site for free -- hence the "first click free" name. Earlier this year, Google said this program was OK for web publishers to use -- not just news publishers. Today, they've done a post more formally making that point. Let me take you through some of the history of this program as it relates to web search. Back in March 2007, Danny Sullivan's Yet Another Debate About Cloaking Happens art [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, Google: Webmaster Central, How To: SEO, SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages, Top News

The Long Road To The Debate Over “White Hat Cloaking”

Jul 1, 2008 at 3:13pm ET by Danny Sullivan

I really hate arguments over cloaking. Like really hate them. But Rand Fishkin recently did a chart outlining the degrees of "safeness" to cloaking that in turn riled up Google's Matt Cutts in comments there. No doubt others at search engines also dislike the idea that any cloaking is "white hat." So I wanted to revisit some of the things that Rand outlined about cloaking plus the guidelines Google updated last month. Over the years, content delivery methods that were once considered cloaking have become acceptable. This is a look at what those are and how we need a new na [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages

Google Defines IP Delivery, Geolocation, & Cloaking

Jun 3, 2008 at 10:16am ET by Barry Schwartz

Maile Ohye at the Google Webmaster Central Blog has "defined" what Google considers to be IP delivery, geolocation, and cloaking. On the geolocation front, Google recommends you treat "Googlebot as you would a typical user from a similar location." So, if Googlebot's IP is coming from California, then serve up the same page you would serve a web user from California. The same rule applies to IP delivery: serve the "same content a typical user from the same IP address would see" to Googlebot. Clearly, if you serve different content to Googlebot then you would a normal user, that would be cl [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages, SEO: Spamming

Microsoft Reports That Issues With Their Live Search Cloaking Detection System Have Been Fixed

Dec 4, 2007 at 3:02pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Today, Microsoft has posted to the Live Search Webmaster Center blog that the cloaking detection system they have been running for the past few months has, for some sites, skewed site statistics and ads reporting, as well as caused a high traffic load, and they have made some adjustments to the process to correct these errors. Below, details on the problems this process caused, what Live Search is doing about them, and a brief look at how the engines have historically dealt with cloaking. For the last few months, there have been slight rumblings in the places webmasters frequent about odd re [...]

Filed in: Microsoft: Bing SEO, SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages

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