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What's a plausible real world use case for this if one wanted to exploit this to game SEO? Can it even be exploited in any way?
by nukeop 9y ago
What's a plausible real world use case for this if one wanted to exploit this to game SEO? Can it even be exploited in any way?
- TomAnthony 9y agoOP here. I made a silly function that identifies Googlebot, but has 'plausible deniability' built in: http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/fun/googlebot_puzzle.html http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/fun/googlebot_puzzle.html The idea being you could use a function to always send Googlebot down one execution path and users down another, and make it look like you are doing an AB test on a small set of traffic. You could then do something nefarious, such as add spammy content to the page for Googlebot. However, in reality it is not likely to be a viable tactic for any decent quality site, and unlikely to have much of an impact on lower quality sites that may be willing to risk it. It is an interesting idea though, and we research this sort of thing such that we can better identify such behaviours in competitors of our clients.
- codedokode 9y agoYou can detect Googlebot by IP address or User-Agent which is much easier.
- lucb1e 9y agoWell, presumably some people want to pose as Google to view content which is reserved to logged in members or bots, in which case the user agent is not advisable.. but indeed, IP address.
- TomAnthony 9y agoYes you can - but it lacks the 'plausible deniability'. Especially if you have it in your frontend code. :)
- realPubkey 9y agoAfter doing seo for 10 years, I assure you that plausible deniability will not give you an advantage. Google will punish your site and not listen to your arguments.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Twirrim 9y agoQuick thought: Your pagerank score is higher if your page loads faster. If you're 100% confident it's the googlebot accessing your site, you could remove all sorts of content from the page being presented to the bot so that it appears like the page is quicker than it will actually appear to real users. On another note, this might be a neat way to avoid or deliberately screw up Googles "knowledge scraping" thing that they're doing which is pissing people off mightily (where when you search for a question, Google gives you the direct answer that they've scraped from another site.)