Google: Hosting Companies Should Serve 500 Status Code On Robot Detection Interstitial

Jan 17, 2022 - 7:31 am 0 by

Googlebot

Google's John Mueller posted one of those PSA tweets this morning asking hosting companies that trigger robot detection interstitials to not use a 200 status code. John also said not to place a noindex on that page. If you do these things the pages served with these can be dropped out of the Google index and search results.

Instead, remove the noindex and serve a 5xx status code, that will help Googlebot deal with the robot detection interstitial.

Here is that tweet:

Then John explains how to do proper Googlebot detection, a topic we covered numerous times here before. Here is that tweet:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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