TweetDeck Redirects GoogleBot To Twitter.com - What's The Reason Behind It?
Two Days Before, I have noticed that when you search for [tweetdeck] in Google TweetDeck.com doesn't display. If you do similar activity in Bing for [tweetdeck], TweetDeck.com does display. If you go on their site as a user to TweetDeck.com, the page does provide. So my question is why it is not displaying in Google? That similar question was asked In Google+. The reply is not that apparent, and it took a Googler to do some inspection work to search out why.
John explained:
It looks like they're doing this based on the user-agent. Checking with Googlebot shows the redirect:Anyone think that this is really cloaking? You can get more information about Google's definition and views on cloaking over here`
$ curl -s -I -A Googlebot http://tweetdeck.com/ | grep -E "(HTTP|Location)" HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://twitter.com/
Using "Bingbot" shows a 200 OK:
$ curl -s -I -A Bingbot http://tweetdeck.com/ | grep -E "(HTTP|Location)"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Using "Slurp" shows the redirect again:
$ curl -s -I -A Slurp http://tweetdeck.com/ | grep -E "(HTTP|Location)"
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://twitter.com/
Theoretically there's also a chance that more is happening on an IP level, or that a very specific user-agent is being looked for, but if it's reacting based on a simplified user-agent like this, then I imagine that's what it's set up for.
There are two questions in my mind:
- Why Google doesn’t take action against this move?
- Is Twitter doing this?