Knowledge Archives
http://www.co-internet.net/net/articles/googletrap.txt.html

The Google Trap: A Warning
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by
Dirk Brockhausen
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If you happen to use Google's proprietary meta tag:



the search results pages will only display your web
page's title and the URL.

No other page content will be displayed.

However, this does not, as has been claimed recently
in various articles and statements (and based on Google's
own misleading statements on site!), deactivate Google's
standard caching function - meaning that if you omit to
exclude this function specifically, any cloaked page's
content you may have submitted would be displayed for
every one to see, thus constituting a prime decloaking
hazard. (Note that we have always advised against cloaking
for Google!)

The only way to prevent Google from caching your page
content and offering it to everyone for display is to
use Google's proprietary meta tag:



More info on the NOSNIPPET tag can be found on Google's
site at:

< http://www.google.com/remove.html#remove_snippets >

Here, it specifically says:

"A snippet is a text excerpt from the returned result page
that has all query terms bolded. The excerpt allows users to
see the context in which search terms appear on a web page,
before clicking on the result. Users are more likely to click
on a search result if it has a corresponding snippet.

If you wish to prevent Google from displaying snippets for
your pages, use the following tag:

"

However, note the following misleading statement on this
page:

"Note: removing snippets also removes cached pages."


Google, sad to say, cannot be believed in this point -
yet another case of a search engine publishing faulty
if not downright destructive advice on search engine
optimization!

This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
Downloaded at: < http://fantomaster.com/ >