OT: Browser user agent switching tip
Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 10:20 pm
Hopefully the mods don't mind posting this, I know it will be useful to a lot of the posters on here but I'll avoid being bad by not explaining why. If it is an issue just delete it.
Sometimes a useful site will suddenly start trying to get you to install questionable content from, oh I don't know, powered-by.zango.com for instance, and that can send things a little haywire... Just an interesting little thing I've found to do for those with Firefox- most of the sites that add something like that still want google to get in to be able to index their pages (even if a particular site doesn't want to show up on google) so by default these add on things will allow the googlebot to get past the "must install our questionable thing to get past the front page" requirement. So if you have firefox, go install this (if you don't already have it)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
it will allow you to change the user-agent tag your browser sends out, from there add the user-agent string for the google bot (options\user agent\add then grab the string from http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/pgtsj0208i.html ) and hey presto you can go back to your site of choice without any problems as they think you are one of the plethora of googlebots in the world.
Sometimes a useful site will suddenly start trying to get you to install questionable content from, oh I don't know, powered-by.zango.com for instance, and that can send things a little haywire... Just an interesting little thing I've found to do for those with Firefox- most of the sites that add something like that still want google to get in to be able to index their pages (even if a particular site doesn't want to show up on google) so by default these add on things will allow the googlebot to get past the "must install our questionable thing to get past the front page" requirement. So if you have firefox, go install this (if you don't already have it)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
it will allow you to change the user-agent tag your browser sends out, from there add the user-agent string for the google bot (options\user agent\add then grab the string from http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/pgtsj0208i.html ) and hey presto you can go back to your site of choice without any problems as they think you are one of the plethora of googlebots in the world.