Hello!
Does anyone know if google bot accepts persistent cookies (not session cookies)?
No, Googlebot will not send cookies.
That’s lame, isn’t it?
I’ve heard that the consensus on XML/XSLT based website that Google does not index such sites.
Is this correct?
No, I don’t think it’s lame.
If you are outputting the XHTML resulting from doing the XSLT on the server, then there’s no reason Google wouldn’t index it.
No, I was talking about outputting XML that includes XSL template
Modern browsers will render it correctly, then why would not google index it?
It’s probably not difficult for google to have their xslt-based engine to render the page and index it.
Anyway, I am developing xml/xslt based website and because of this google indexing/not indexing issue I have to process the template on the server but for actual users I want to output the XML file.
I also don’t want google to think that I am doing some tricks and sending different content to google and to actual users.
Because the Googlebot is a program with one objective. To crawl and index CONTENT. Cookies are not content, and since they are not part of the Web page itself, the bot has no reason to index it.
In a practical sense, if there are pages whose content depend on the value of a cookie, there’s no way Google could send someone to those pages from search results as they’re not identified by unique URLs. So while Google might reach more content by accepting cookies, it would have no way of disseminating that content.
Wow. I just imagined how many cookies Googlebot would have to store if he would really support them. I have a stack overflow 