The Google Webmaster Central Blog is discussing a pretty advanced topic on webserving techniques. For the novice webmasters, this topic may be a bit on the heavy side, but for the more advanced webmasters, webserving techniques such as IP delivery, geolocation, cloaking and first click free may sound familiar at all.
According to the webmaster central blog, web serving techniques relating to Googlebot include:
- Geolocation – is all about serving targeted/different content to users based on their location. If you are a webmaster, you can determine users’ location from the preferences stored in their cookie. This includes information relating to their login or IP addess.
- IP delivery: is all about serving targeted/different content to users based on their IP address, which happens to provide geographic information. Googlebot sees the same content a typical user from the same IP address.
- Cloaking: Cloaking is a clear violation of the webmaster guidelines as it serves different content to users than to Googlebot. Webmaster may face a problem regarding cloaking if Googlebot finds something different from what users see. For webmasters, they must ensure that the files that both Googlebot and users see identical.
- First click free – allows webmasters to include premium or subscription-based content in Google’s websearch index without violating websites quality guidelines. Webmasters can let all users who find their page using Google search to see the full text of the document, even if they have not registered or subscribed. The user’s first click to content area is free. However, webmasters can block the user with a login or payment request when he clicks away from that page to another section of the site.
For a more detailed background on IP delivery, watch this long video which might even make you feel dizzy since IP delivery is a pretty advanced topic for webmasters.
