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Originally Posted by trilljester
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Thank you for your note. We recognize your concern. Please be advised that
we don't personally review individual sites, nor do we comment on
webmaster techniques or the details of our search technology beyond what
appears on our site.
We've dedicated an entire section of our site to answering the most common
questions from those who maintain and/or promote websites. You'll find all
of our publicly available information information posted at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html
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This is not a definitive clarification of the issue in any way. Google has basically said they don't discuss individual cases or divilge their indexing or verfication processes (apart from saying it's done by spiders not humans), and that you'll find the answers to all your questions in their webmasters' FAQ. It's left completely to the individual to interpret the TOS and decide what's black hat.
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Originally Posted by Andreas
Attention
Using this Hack is to be considered cloaking your site, and you risk being banned from search engine indexes - like it recently happened to BMW.
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To be fair, the BMW case involves very different issues. BMW.de was using quite blatant and crude cloaking: spiders were redirected to pages chocked full of car related keywords at a much greater density than on the pages shown to ordinary visitors in an attempt to boost page rank. Very old, tired strategies that Google can spot at 100 MegaPaces.
I face the usual competing goals of retaining control of my site's privacy and member priviledges while ensuring good SE ranking and the delivery of relevant GoogleAds (and hence healthy GoogleAds revenues). One added problem in all this is that if you have restricted the forum viewing access to logged-in visitors, installed the mod and had your forum pages indexed by Google (essentially the archive URL versions of them), the Google search results will reveal the content via the "Cached" link for each result. If unlogged-in visitors from the Google results click the ordinary link, they will be confronted by a login screen but not if they click the "Cached" link. To avoid this hole in your security you need to add a robots no-cache meta tag to your
headerinclude template:
Code:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noarchive">
This says to all spiders that visit this page "you may index this page, and any pages linked to it via hyperlinks but you may not store the content of any of them in the Googlesearch engine cache".
You should also edit/install a
robots.txt file in your root or forum folder with the following content:
Code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
These settings say to the 2 spiders
Googlebot and
Mediapartners-Google (the GoogleAds spider) "roam my site at will" but tells all others to not crawl any part of my site. It should be noted that only spiders that play by the rules read the
robots.txt file. All the big names obey the robots.txt directives but there are lots of smaller rogue spiders who ignore them. Another good reason to edit your
spiders_vbulletin.xml file to define which spiders will be accepted into your forum by this mod.
Nice mod but it's operating in the grey zone and until Google definitively clarifies whether it's OK for a spider to see my forum content while an unlogged-in visitor can not, I will not be installing it. I can't afford the risk of losing my significant monthly GoogleAds income or my healthy SE ranking.
I will write to Google and report here if I get a clearer answer than
trilljester received.
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