June 11, 2008
How Does Google Handle The HTML <base> Tag?
There is an interesting Google Groups thread discussing how Google handles the <base> HTML tag. The base tag specifies a base URL for all the links in a page. But how does Googlebot or Google handle indexing this tag?
Google Groups member, Webado said you should be "careful using the base tag". Why?
Google's cache adds a base tag set to your own domain root url. If your page is using a different base tag this will result in broken images, missing scripts and css files - all of those end up even mroe broken than it's usual in the cache.
Member, RainboRick said that the major search engines typically "ignore the HTML mark-up in that regard (keyword density)- even MSN."
Forum discussion at Google Groups.
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rustybrick in Google Optimization at June 11, 2008 8:36 AM
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So if the major browsers handle the <base> tag correctly (and I haven't checked) that could be a really simple way of serving different content to GoogleBot than human surfers but you could hardly call it cloaking.
You could serve mydomain.com/index.css to GoogleBot but <base>/index.css to browsers and hide half your text. I know GoogleBot is supposed to check for such things.
Posted by andymurd at June 12, 2008 13:18