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Alistair Lattimore posted an interesting question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about the Google Plus Button.
He asked how does the Google plus button comply with the crawler directives. If a crawler is blocked and if Google uses +1 data for ranking, does the crawler still use that data?
Googler, Jenny Murphy, provides a quick answer:
The +1 Button interacts with robots.txt and other crawler directives in an interesting way. Since +1's can only be applied to public pages, we may visit your page at the time the +1 Button is clicked to verify that it is indeed public. This check ignores crawler directives. This does not, however, impact the behavior of Google web search crawlers and how they interact with your robots.txt file.
So there you have it.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
guest
08/12/2011 03:31 pm
I just don't understand the problem here. Whenever you put an image or javascript on your webpage that is hosted on someone else's server like script src=facebookserver /like.js or script src=googleserver /plusone.js or even img src=someadvertiserserver / bannerimage.gif They all get an entry in their server log for every visitor to your page that says... John Doe visited your website with all of the info that you see in your own server logs like time, IP, browser, etc. Often even more than you collect in your logs. If you don't mind these sites seeing all of your visitor data, then why would you mind them sending a verification bot to look at your page?
eltercerhombre
08/12/2011 05:41 pm
Maybe because if they know your page is public they get additonal info about it? ;)
phd dissertation
08/12/2011 06:10 pm
good point! thansk!
James Eagle
08/15/2011 04:24 pm
It states that this does not happen.
eltercehombre
08/16/2011 09:31 am
Knowing if it's public or not it's itself additional info ;)
kevin anchi
08/16/2011 01:50 pm
smart move google