There’s been debate over the past year or so about sites with registration systems allowing Google in but stopping others who must either have a free or paid registration. But that’s cloaking! Well, Google eventually said they really prefer that users see what the spider sees, in the end. Now new guidelines from Google say that at least for Google news, IP delivery is perfectly fine.
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FYI, http://searchengineland.com/070304-231603.php has some old history on cloaking as well as looks at some of the recent issues with registration. And to quote the guidelines, in case they change in the future: "Currently, crawlers can’t fill out registration forms, nor do they support cookies. Given that, we need to be able to circumvent your registration page in order to successfully crawl your site. The easiest way to do this is to configure your webservers to not serve the registration page to our crawlers (when the User-Agent is "Googlebot"). You can verify that the request is actually from our robot by making sure the IP address is within the range of 66.249.64.0/20. It’s equally important that your robots.txt file permits Googlebot to access your site."
This has been around for a long while but I guess only communicated to sites in Google News, with a paywall and a relationship with Google. I really recommend that sites not yet in Google News stay clear of FCF. It’s something to revisit once/if Google News approval is met. It’s also important to ensure that only Google News (hence the IP address) is effected in this way. This is still spammy for Google Web.
I blogged about legitimate cloaking last month. Registration required sites is the example I used to support my claim. Here is the post http://hamletbatista.com/2007/06/26/legitimate-cloaking-real-world-example-and-php-source-code
Google Blogoscoped has a similar article I see. It’s on Sphinn here: http://sphinn.com/story/919 And story here: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-19-n63.html
I still don’t like this, but I’ll accept the "subscription designation" as fair warning to users.
Barry pointed me to the fact that these particular help documents on IP targeting have been up since May: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013561.html He spots everything :) So the advice has been out there for at least several weeks, but I guess the announcement this week that Google News has all these new help files (http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/empowering-publishers-with-new-help.html) is bringing more attention to them.