when searching for tech help i've been noticing results from webmasterworld.com lately. webmasterworld.com shows up on google searches, but it does NOT have the Cached link. further, the short quote google displays does not appear on the page linked to, instead your taken to a subscription page.
at first I thought it might be simple UA detection, so I tried changing my browsers UA to googlebot but that did not get me in. perhaps IP address based filtering or some such.
technical discussions aside, google not showing the Cached link makes me think webmasterworld.com has payed them off. anyone know what the deal is? i don't like getting search results that are advertisments instead of results.
nielsencl posted this at 01:51—11th August 2006.
He has: 20 posts
Joined: Dec 2004
I doubt that Google is being "paid off". It may be that they are cloaking the pages to only allow Googlebot to spider and index the pages, then when you try to visit you get that message.
I had seen what you describe before and had not thought about it.
I just tried to look at some pages from Google listings and it worked fine. It may just be on those parts of their forums that they require membership to see. I'm guessing that they are using a form of cloaking so the pages get indexed, but are not visable to those that are not a member. Pretty clever way to get exposure for your site, but still be able to charge people to get in. I wonder what Google would think if it was reported to them...?
In poking around a bit you may want to check out their robots.txt and also a link they post there to http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt?view=producecode.
If you study what they are doing it's pretty interesting and may teach us all a few "tricks"....! With their method you can effectively "allow" what bots you want to allow and not create large lists of what you want to keep out...
Nielsen Technical Services
http://www.DomainIncubation.com/
http://www.Best-Free-Search-Engine-List.com
lamad posted this at 14:58—11th August 2006.
They have: 14 posts
Joined: Dec 2005
interesting! thanks for the link.
that still doesn't explain the lack of google cache though. that is the wierd part.
EDIT: I obviously should have googled it myself. http://www.google.com/help/features.html#cached states a site can just request not to be cached.
Trinity Web Hosting - Dedicated church website design and hosting!