The Google Trap: A Warning

If you happen to use Google's proprietary meta tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

the search results pages will only display your web page's title and the URL.

No other page content will be displayed.

However, this does not, as has been claimed recently in various articles and statements (and based on Google's own misleading statements on site!), deactivate Google's standard caching function - meaning that if you omit to exclude this function specifically, any cloaked page's content you may have Submited would be displayed for every one to see, thus constituting a prime decloaking hazard. (Note that we have always advised against cloaking for Google!)

The only way to prevent Google from caching your page content and offering it to everyone for display is to use Google's proprietary meta tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

More info on the NOSNIPPET tag can be found on Google's site at:

< http://www.google.com/remove.html#remove_snippets >

Here, it specifically says:

"A snippet is a text excerpt from the returned result page that has all query terms bolded. The excerpt allows users to see the context in which search terms appear on a web page, before clicking on the result. Users are more likely to click on a search result if it has a corresponding snippet.

If you wish to prevent Google from displaying snippets for your pages, use the following tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">"

However, note the following misleading statement on this page:

"Note: removing snippets also removes cached pages."

Google, sad to say, cannot be believed in this point - yet another case of a search engine publishing faulty if not downright destructive advice on search engine optimization!