Cookies and a lack of appetite
An HTML cookie is nothing more than a packet of text sent by the server (along with the page being served up) that is immediately sent back to the server. What it does is allow the site to remember a customer’s behaviour, patterns and actions. For instance, if you previously placed a book entitled Web sites that Work into your shopping basket, then the next time you return the site recognises you and that the item remains in your basket. Without cookies you’d be regarded as a brand new customer. At this level cookies are fine, but what if you’ve employed cookies to ascertain that someone has signed in, or has paid a subscription to access certain parts of your website? Well, Google can’t and won’t process cookies and therefore cannot access these “members only” pages. What’s worse is that Google won’t give you the benefit of the doubt – it will assume that you are employing cloacking techniques (i.e. one page served up to human users and another served up to Google). As far as Google is concerned this is inherently wrong, and the reaction is to penalise to the site. Avoid cookies where you can.
