Comment by stordoff
8 years ago
AFAIK, you always get the same page that was shown when coming from Google results. That IMO is enough - what is shown in the search results is an accurate reflection of the page you reach. Requiring that subsequent navigations within the site are also the same seems excessive (as you don't have the context of a results page that would make it seem misleading) and would be an overreach on Google's part IMO.
The Google spider has an entirely different experience, when going from page to page on Quora, than what the user does (someone not signed in).
Google hammers any normal site that gets caught presenting a fundamentally different experience to the user than they do the spider. Google is not unaware that Quora, Pinterest and LinkedIn present different experiences to the bot vs the user, they knowingly allow it for giant services. That's the hypocrisy and double standard.
That’s because the policy isn’t derived from first principles, it’s a flexing of relative muscles. Google knows that small sites don’t have any choice but to comply with their guidelines. They also know that if they start filtering out LinkedIn results, if people are looking for something they expect to find on LinkedIn, they’ll go and search LinkedIn, possibly even before they search Google. Google will not allow that to happen.
Also, Google doesn’t also compete with those companies. I would bet if it were someone who they were competing with on another vertical , they’d be enforcing this policy.