Posted by Philip Ronan on 09/29/05 10:49

"Bob Bedford" wrote:

> I've a question about generating pages for search engines.
>
> It's possible to detect a bot coming on a website and then show a complete
> other page for it ?
> My main page is mainly graphic, with a form. Quite no text at all. I would
> preffer instead to show a site description to bots ! Not spamming at all,
> just trying to tell to the bots that my site is not what people see and just
> a search engine, but a real site with real potential.
>
> How to do so ?

Don't.

What you're proposing (serving different content to search engines) is
called "cloaking". Not only does it annoy users when they discover that the
search terms they are looking for don't exist on your page, but it is also
liable to get your site blacklisted by Google. (See their guidelines at
<http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality>.)

Are you using graphics to display text in your pages? Don't do that either.
<http://webpagesthatsuck.com/biggest-web-design-mistakes-in-2004-part2.html>
explains why (scroll down to #9)

Phil

--
phil [dot] ronan @ virgin [dot] net
http://vzone.virgin.net/phil.ronan/

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