Googlebot does not accept cookies – Alexa Flash Briefing Skill (SEO Tips)
Hello. Thanks for listening to SEO Tips today.
Today’s tip is a technical tip (actually three tips) based on some behavior that I saw on the website I was checking out yesterday. So here’s the gist of the problem. Googlebot does not accept cookies. It also doesn’t execute JavaScript or fill in form fields. I created a persona for Goobot you can find here that outlines how Googlebot behaves.
Here’s a quote from John Mueller related to the cookie issue:
“Googlebot also doesn’t keep a cookie. So it wouldn’t be able to say well I’ll click accept now and the next time I crawl your website you just show me your content normally. Googlebot wouldn’t be able to kind of return that cookie to you and say I agree with your kind of Terms of Service.”
On this website I’m looking at, they have Googlebot hitting the root URL going through a more than 5 redirect chain and then landing on at URL that has a dynamic element indicating that the blot has accepted a cookie. On that URL, there is a canonical tag pointing back to the root URL — the URL without the dynamic element.
This website is telling Googlebot don’t index the URL you are on with the dynamic element at the end, instead please index the root URL that kicks you through more than 5 redirect chains that you won’t be able to follow. While the canonical tag is a hint, not a directive, this site is executing more than 5 redirects for every URL it wants to be indexed. Ultimately none of the URLs on this site will be indexed.
So here are the three tips related to this one issue:
- Remember that Google bought does not go past 5 redirects in a redirect chain.
- Googlebot does not accept cookies, so don’t set up your website where Googlebot is forced to accept cookies
- Be careful of your canonical tags make sure your canonical tag actually points the root URL that you want to be indexed by Googlebot – a URL Googlebot can get to.
Thanks for listening today. Come back tomorrow for more SEO tips.
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