Reasons for using Googlebot user agent?

[DiscoStu]

What are the reasons for wanting to occasionally switching to the Googlebot user agent? I know people do it to check for cloaking, but are there other reasons? Just curious to hear how people use it...

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:48 pm (utc) on Mar 18, 2010]
[edit reason] fixed typo [/edit]

[incrediBILL]

Snooping people do this to see how Google sees your website, mostly for SEO purposes.

Some sites only send text to Google, no formatting.

Some sites load their text with extra keywords for Google to see.

However, smart sites like mine validate Googlebot and will boot you to the curb for faking so you'll never see what I'm showing Google, never, ever.

[keyplyr]

However, smart sites like mine validate Googlebot and will boot you to the curb for faking so you'll never see what I'm showing Google, never, ever.

+1

[sonjay]

At least one site (and we probably all know which one I'm talking about) shows Googlebot answers to questions, but only shows the questions to real people, along with a link to sign up for a paid subscription. Unless you tell your browser to send a Googlebot UA; then you get the answers too. That site does not validate Googlebot.

[jmccormac]

Scrapers use this in an attempt to bypass controls. Some sites will whitelist the large search engine bots but apply access controls and limits to ordinary browsers.

Regards...jmcc