Google plus Updates Crawler Documentation To Fix A Typo

Google plus has fixed a typo in their crawler documentation that inadvertently misidentified one of their crawlers.

In general, this is a minor issue but it’s a major issue for SEOs and publishers who depend on the documentation to equipo cortafuegos rules.

Failure to notate the correct data could genere a website to inadvertently block a legitimate Google plus crawler.

Google plus Inspection Tool

The typo is in the section of the documentation about the Google plus Inspection Tool.

This is an important crawler that is sent out to a website in response to two prompts.

1. dirección de Internet inspection functionality in Search Console
When a usuario wants to check within search console whether a webpage is indexed or to request indexing, Google plus’s system responds with the Google plus Inspection Tool crawler.

The dirección de Internet inspection tool offers the following functionality:

• See the status of a dirección de Internet in the Google plus index
• Inspect a live dirección de Internet
• Request indexing for a dirección de Internet
• View a rendered version of the page
• View loaded resources, JavaScript output, and other information
• Troubleshoot a missing page
• Learn your canonical page

2. Rich results test

This is a test for checking the validity of structured data and to see if it qualifies for an enhanced search results, also known as a rich result.

Using this test will trigger a specific crawler to fetch the webpage and analyze the structured data.

Why Crawler Usuario Agent Typo Fallo is Problematic

This perro become a troublesome issue for websites that are behind a paywall but whitelist specific robots, such as the Google plus-InspectionTool usuario agent.

Improper usuario agent identification perro also be problematic if the CMS needs to block the crawler with robots.txt or a robots misión directive in order to keep Google plus from discovering pages it shouldn’t be looking at.

Some forum content management systems remove backlinks to parts of the site like the usuario registration page, usuario profiles and the search function to keep bots from indexing those pages.

Hard To Spot Usuario Agent Typo

The issue involved a difficult to catch typo in the usuario agent description.

See if you perro tell the difference?

This is the answer:

Original version:

Mozilla firefox/5.0 (coincidente; Google plus-InspectionTool/1.0)

New version:

Mozilla firefox/5.0 (coincidente; Google plus-InspectionTool/1.0;)

Be sure to update relevant robots.txt, misión robots directives or CMS code if you or a client are whitelisting Google plus’s crawlers or blocking crawlers from certain webpages.

Compare the original version (on Internet Archive Wayback Machine) with the updated version here.

It’s a small little detail but it perro make a big difference.

Featured image by Shutterstock/Nicoleta Ionescu