Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Note that sending a different response to googlebot than what you send to normal users is a violation of Google's guidelines and can get your site penalized. Use at your own peril.


Not necessarily. This concept of HTML snapshots is actually suggested by Google as a solution.

See this: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...

We comply with Google's guidelines thing (https://snapsearch.io/documentation)


No where in that article does it say it's ok to only serve the snapshot to googlebot. Serving different content to googlebot than what you serve to users is called cloaking and is against their guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

I've invested a significant amount of time in this topic and would love if you were right, but I've never seen the money quote that it's ok to do this. In fact, everything I've read says that you have to treat search bots the same as you treat normal users.


The title of the article says "How do I create an HTML snapshot?"

The FAQ (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...) goes into more detail regarding the concept of _escaped_fragment_ which is used in so that your server can respond with a static snapshot instead of javascript.

Look at the diagram at the bottom of this page (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...)

It explicitly says "snapshots"




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: