Yesterday, we reported that Google’s John Mueller said that if you block a whole region from accessing your site, it would be considered cloaking and thus be against Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

Since then, we have seen many comments on that coverage, including lots of discussion across dozens of forums. The discussion was not positive and they called this policy, simply, outright wrong. Well, you are all right. Google has retracted that statement.

John said at the Google Groups thread:

That is alright John, we all make mistakes. At least you gave us something to get excited about. 🙂

Google also gave us a general statement on this saying, “As long as the web server always blocks IPs from (say) Africa, it’s not doing anything special/different for Googlebot, and so it wouldn’t be considered cloaking, but geolocation instead.”

Then Matt Cutts of Google commented at the Sphinn thread explaining why Googlers can make mistakes:

Yes, people make mistakes and John was bound to slip up once. Heck, he is a robot in answering questions at Google Groups. I don’t there is another Googler that comes close to his daily average post count. So John, please do keep it up, you simply rock!

Forum discussion at Google Groups, Sphinn, WebProWorld, and WebmasterWorld.