facebook

facebook cloaks / users bot login

[nevets steven]

I checked the cahce pages when i did a site:www.facebook.com search and facebook shows google full profiles of people when it does its search.

googles rule is

"dont show visitors something and a search bot something else"

so if someone like me who doesnt use face book visits I will get diff info than if googlebot visits.

isnt this basically cloaking (regardless if they login googlebot or just show full info)?

[incrediBILL]

I'll have to beg Brett's forgiveness for dredging up the past but WebmasterWorld is actually one of the few cases where this very issue has been discussed and resolved with Google's Matt Cutts on his blog.

Matt said it was cloaking when WebmasterWorld originally put up a login page first, before showing any content. However, after Brett changed the code to show one page, the page Google indexed, and then show a login page if you tried to go further, it was no longer considered cloaking and resolved.

So based on that thread from Matt, what you're describing with facebook is definitely cloaking and against Google's rules unless they show you the exact page Google indexed before requiring a login. If you've already seen one page from a Google search and then get a login, it's perfectly legitimate to restrict access beyond a single access.

However, I just tried what you described and was able to view multiple members pages without any issue.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 4:57 pm (utc) on June 8, 2008]

[nevets steven]

"However, I just tried what you described and was able to view multiple members pages without any issue."

I know right, its like google is automatically loged in when it visits the page, so It looks at the site the same as a loged in user.

so one could argue that this could be done on anysite without retrubition from big G?

[Receptional Andy]

The cache I see is the same as the page the user sees, unless I'm missing something? Certain profiles (e.g. bands) seem to be public for everybody.

Note that I don't even have a facebook account, so I don't really know what I'm talking about on this one ;)

[incrediBILL]

Same here, I don't have a facebook account either and I saw exactly what Google saw.

[kceleb9]

This was an interesting post - i was not familiar with the issue of cloaking....

any sense of how common this is? I would like to look more into this.