Page question

[jac1092]

If I have a site that requires users to enter at the home page so they can choose the high or low bandwidth version and the language. I would like google to index and crawl the site freely but i want to redirect users to the homepage so they can set a cookie of the options for the site. How do i do this without closing the site to bots/spiders etc..?

Any ideas

Thansk
John

[jac1092]

you can detect the user agent with PHP, so you could tell if the visitor was using IE/mozilla, or if the visitor was actually google. It would probably be easier to add in a check for the most common user agents that web browsers have, then assume everything else is a bot/spider, rather then the other way around.

John

[greeneagle]

I would definitely refrain from sending bots one place and visitors to another!

Your high and low bandwidth versions should be different context and media most likely. Your different language versions would not represent a dupe content problem either.

I don't understand the issue here!

Link them all up from the main entry page, what's the percieved problem?

Ken

[DrTandem1]

Since it is important that the visitor select a language, this is one instance where a splash page of sorts is needed. However, I'm not so sure why you want a section for high and low bandwidth. You should concentrate on your site being usable across a wide range of browsers and connections.

Many times, having duplicate content, even that used for aiming at different bandwidths, can get you penalized. Some, using lots of animation such as Flash, won't have content to index anyway. So, there is really little point in spending the time (money) and energy in building a site that may be ignored by the SEs, if that is where you expect to get a good share of traffic.

[cbstomper]

I think we need to focus more and more on high bandwidth sites as fiber roles out across the nation and the TV frequencies become available giving way for broadband wireless and with the dropping prices in bandwidth your site will need to take advantage of this technology. It is like the first day you got high speed it was like discovering a whole new internet. I believe before long there will be sites with a virtual host that guides you threw the web site via voice commands in an interactive fashion.

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[mantawebsolutions]

I agree with both greeneagle and DrTandem1.

Move away from both High and Low Bandwidth sites, make one site that is userfriendly that does not contain duplicate content (except for different languages). Make sure that you optimize all the images and pages to reduce download time and make sure that the Search Engines are able to crawl those page by providing good text links to them.

Some countries still don't have high speed connections and those who do have charge explicit amounts of money to use it. South Africa for instance is catching up, but we still pay a lot for DSL, Satelite and T1 connections.

[weslinda]

I agree with most of the comments above. One site, with some high bandwidth content selectable through links. Let them know what's available to them.

A lot of people do this because they want a pretty flash site. Unfortunately, most flash sites don't work well for SEO and search engines. I'd love to see people start fusing overall quality design, for the end user, and built for their target audience.

Build a clean, standards compliant site, with options to your high bandwidth content.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by greeneagle

I would definitely refrain from sending bots one place and visitors to another!

I agree ken, but sometimes clients just need to do this. I am working with one right now where we are seeing success with IP delievery. They are choosing not to use cookies and are lacing session IDs in the URL string so we are basically cloaking to get around this, YUCK!