I noticed the other day that webmasterworld allow google to spider and index all forums and threads, But users have to register.
What i was wondering is, Wouldn't this be seen as cloaking by google?
(serving a different page to spider bots and users)

Obviously the intention of doing this is to have pages in the google index, while not actually giving those pages to visitors who find the page from searching google..

Not that i want to see them banned, I wouldn't want that at all, But id like to understand if this is a risk or not.

Ooops, I meant to post this in the Google Foorum.

Originally Posted by stOx

I noticed the other day that webmasterworld allow google to spider and index all forums and threads, But users have to register.
What i was wondering is, Wouldn't this be seen as cloaking by google?
(serving a different page to spider bots and users)

As far as I think yes.

Originally Posted by stOx

Obviously the intention of doing this is to have pages in the google index, while not actually giving those pages to visitors who find the page from searching google..

But you can always see them in cache and so if I were to vote for such things I would never do that. In fact there is no point in forcing a user to register when he dont want to.

Originally Posted by stOx

Not that i want to see them banned, I wouldn't want that at all, But id like to understand if this is a risk or not.

I want them to get banned because the no of rumours generated from WMW is just horrible.