« Alexa Attempts To Make Rankings Less Flawed | Home | Lets start flashing »
Nike.com Pay Attention - Googlebot Cloaking Broken
By VaBeachKevin | April 29, 2008
I like Nike.com. I think it is a real neat site with a good amount of sizzle. Lots of videos and fancy flash all over the place. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But as far as Google bot is concerned, it’s a no-no. But hey, thats cool, adjustments can be made to make everyone happy. This is a case where cloaking is a good thing. Nike’s all flash website is a nightmare for crawlers, so they decide to just serve them up a nice simple non-flash version, so their data can still be crawled. I’m fine with it, Nike is fine with it, and Googlebot is fine with it. The problem comes in when you don’t pay attention to it. You have basically created another page that needs to be kept up regularly, and properly maintained. And if you don’t problems arise.
I often use Nike as an example of good cloaking. I show people the regular site, then show them the cloaked page and everything is fine. But today I go to take a look, and what do I see when I swith my user-agent to Googlebot?
A busted page. Google comes along to see you site and what do they get? A busted page. Not good. OK, maybe they can try to fix it before the spiders come along and that busted page gets indexed. Let’s take a look at their Google result.
It seems that Googlebot has seen the busted page, indexed it and is using that error text as the site’s description. Bad news. All the more reason to keep up with this kind of thing. Now this may not hurt Nike to bad, they are a massive global brand. When someone types in Nike and see’s that result, chances are the description will do little to deter them from clicking the link, which will take them to the correct homepage. But how about your site that is not as big as Nike? Make sure you pay attention to your good cloaked pages, your robots.txt file, and other vital site elements. Its just good practice to keep aware of what’s going on with your site.
2 Responses to “Nike.com Pay Attention - Googlebot Cloaking Broken”
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[…] X wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI like Nike.com. I think it is a real neat site with a good amount of sizzle. Lots of videos and fancy flash all over the place. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But as far as Google bot is concerned, it’sa no-no. … […]
Posted by: nike » Blog Archive » Nike.com Pay Attention - Googlebot Cloaking Broken on April 29th, 2008 at 2:57 pm[…] other vital site elements….This is a case where cloaking is a good thing…. source: Nike.com Pay Attention - Googlebot Cloaking Broken, […]
Posted by: Nike.com Pay Attention - Googlebot Cloaking Broken — Qualified Traffic SEO Tips and blog on April 30th, 2008 at 11:20 am