Matt Cutt's State of the Index 2009

[travelin cat]

Matt just posted a new video re-creating the State of the Index talk from last years Vegas Pubcon:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 5:42 pm (utc) on Jan. 21, 2010]
[edit reason] made the link clickable [/edit]

[tedster]

That video jogged my memory about one valuable tool I'd forgotten - "Fetch As Googlebot". This Webmaster Tools function lets a webmaster see if they've been hacked, especially when the hack also cloaks content and only shows it to googlebot.

There is a lot of this kind of cloaked hack going around for the past year, and it is very devious. Switching the user-agent in your browser to googlebot doesn't always reveal the cloak. This is because some cloaks also embed IP detection! This makes the "Fetch As Googlebot" utility a very helpful tool.