Sometimes I set my user agent to Googlebot to get past paywalls or registration walls. Some websites serve up a different page for Googlebot because they want to keep their paywall but also have their page indexed at the same time. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

This is called cloaking, and when Google catches people doing this they get penalized in search results. You can get past cloaking by looking in the Google cache too.

It’s surprising how many websites do search engine cloaking like that.

I never found a follow up either not that I looked much but I suspect the charges were dropped and if he was a litigious type, he sued. Hopefully he won too :)

I remember reading about this back in the day. Very silly stuff. I wonder how this all turned out in the end. I don’t think I ever saw a followup on this story.

OMG, I was looking around for a site to test my new useragent string (in Swiftweasel) on and found this rather old article, Jailed for using a nonstandard browser

You’re welcome :)

Thank you :P

Thanks. Good advice and a great tip.