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I don't know what the deal is, but it's weird on SO's part. If the issue is, as a sibling comment says, presentation html / js confusing G's crawler, then you
by earl 16y ago
I don't know what the deal is, but it's weird on SO's part. If the issue is, as a sibling comment says, presentation html / js confusing G's crawler, then you email your account manager at Google and it will almost certainly be completely kosher to show the G scraper different material than is displayed, as long as the difference is true to the intent of the searcher. So you can present the G crawler just questions and answers with no javascript and no additional markup.
- codinghorror 16y agoGood idea, but I have no idea who our account manager is at Google. Do we even have an 'account manager'? what do they manage exactly, we don't do any adsense. I'll try to find out. but I'm kinda skeptical this approach (serve googlebot one set of content, everyone else something else) is something that Google would actually want to encourage at scale on any site.
- Aaronontheweb 16y agoObvious question, but have you reached out to Matt Cutts yet?
- codinghorror 16y agoI'll try, but Matt is a busy guy.
- Aaronontheweb 16y agoHe is, but he's exceptionally helpful and generous with his time. Has my utmost respect.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoI'm looking into this a bit now. It's not a clearcut situation, in that SO has a license that allows copying. Jeff, drop me an email and let's talk about it more (I followed you on Twitter so you can DM me). The specific example at http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/5385/page-appears-indexed-in-google-but-not-findable-for-any-search-terms http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/5385/page-appe... is ranking SO at #1 for me now, but if you send some more examples I'm happy to chat with people in the search quality team about this.
- slaven 16y agoCloaking (the name for faking out the google-bot) is NOT cool by Google. There are ways to accomplish the same thing without cloaking, for example making sure content loads first, keeping markup and presentation away from the main HTML, etc.
- sysop073 16y agoAre you sure? I thought they were generally ok with it as long as it was the same information the user sees, just presented differently to help Google index it better
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoNo, cloaking is a violation of our quality guidelines.