http://www.google.com/translate_t
The Google tool above is made for the purpose of translating web pages. However, it has one other very useful and interesting purpose if you are willing to think creatively: Finding out if your competitors are cloaking Google.
Cloaking is when different pages are shown to different users. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for this, such as geo-targeting. Often, however, “black hat” SEOs and webmasters will use cloaking to trick Google and other search engines. For instance, they might show the search engine a well-written, unbiased page about pharmaceutical drug research, while showing the end-user (you and me) a page full of “buy viagra” spam.
How does the Google Translate tool help you discover if a competitor is cloaking Google?
The best way to see the version of a page as Google sees it is to view the “cached” version of the page. There should be a link to the cached version in directly under the search result for that page. However, savvy webmasters can block Google from caching the page using a “noarchive” meta tag. Whenever I see a page in the search result WITHOUT a cache link below it, my Spam-Sensors immediately go up and I suspect that the page is being cloaked. This is where the Google Translate Tool comes in handy:
Go to http://www.google.com/translate_t
Where it says translate a web page, type in the web page that you want to view. German-to-English is fine. This will show you the page as if you were viewing it from a Google IP address. In other words, it hides you behind one of Google’s computers.
This is also known as a “proxy” search. People sell programs that allow you to “surf the web anonymously” for thousands of dollars. Really, this is all they are giving you and you can get it at the link above for free. There are many other proxy servers out there not affiliated with Google. Just do a search for “free proxy search”.
NOTE: You may see that the text reads strange. This is just a translation issue that you can ignore.
What else is this tool good for besides translating and catching cloakers?
The reason I went in search of something like this was because one of my clients’ sites requires cookies and I wanted to show the IT and marketing people that Google can’t view their Shop pages for that reason. So I had them go to the Google Translation Tool and enter the shop using Google’s IP address. This proved that Google was unable to view their shop because it took their spider (googlebot) to the “You don’t have cookies enabled” page after they clicked the shop link.
Yet, when they entered the shop without using the tool, everything seemed to work fine. They were blocking Google from viewing their site by asking the GoogleBot to accept a cookie. Obviously, they did not want to block the largest search engine in the world from crawling and indexing their pages, so we made some changes and now Google results are climbing steadily.
You may not ever have a need for this, but the fact that it allows you to search the web while hiding behind one of Google’s computers is pretty darn interesting.
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OK… Having read to the end I understand. I think you saved the best bit to the 3rd to last paragraph! I’d be really interested if you wrote the same piece but titled it ‘allowing the client to see their site the way Google does’ I think you’d have a load more readers taking notice.
Maybe I would, but for me there are so many tools out there that allow you to see your website through a search engines eye’s that it’s not really big news.
I think it is more important as a way to find out if someone is cloaking to show Google different content. Sometimes you can’t tell because they use the noarchive meta tag, which keeps Google from displaying the “cached” link in the SERPS.
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