Having trouble with that Google +1 button even after going through all the post and discussions on their site? Check this out.

If you have been a visitor on this website and tried to do a +1. You would notice that it never worked and I gave up trying to fix it until today. I found that...

Google's +1 would send a verification bot out to check if the URL stated is accessible or not before allowing you to +1 it.

Which means if you ever try and debug the request and see a 400 error, it is likely that Google's bot could not reach the site. Which makes perfect sense in my case because Google most likely sent a bot that assumes the immediate URL would point to the content.

However my site is built to check for cookies support in new visitors hence why on initial access Google's bot would get redirected to a cookie check before redirected back to the original URL again. (This happens seamlessly to real visitors).

I know bots have these bad habits with that kind of Web Application checking requirements hence there is an exclusion for bots in place. However the problem comes from the fact that Google's bot is not adhering to the bot standard and is masquerading as a normal Firefox 1.0 client with user agent string: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4" coming from Google's 74.125.X.X IP range

All these would've been avoided if either :
(a) Google implements it's bots as bots
(b) Google actually masquerade as a real user properly by following redirection to end up on the real content

Cookie checks like mine are not uncommon and are not bad practises as one is expected to check for cookies particularly in a web application environment with no set defined entry points.

Would be great to see what Google's official stance on this issue is and if anyone else has suggestions on a better cookie checking mechanism that works in an all entry point environment given that the system needs to know on first load whether the client supports cookies or not.

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