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Cookies and bots
Posted: Sat Nov 25, 2006 3:08 pm
by piwanek
Hi guys.
I'm guessing this is the wrong forum to ask this question. If so I sincerely apologize.
I have a question about cookies and bots and how to work around it.
We recently built a site which has a disclaimer page that sets a cookie to enter the site. Unfortunately it seems Google and all the others aren't getting past that page.
Is there an easy way to work around this? The site is built in php. Has anyone run into the same problem and if so, how did you solve it?
Posted: Sat Nov 25, 2006 4:56 pm
by Ambush Commander
Sniff Google's user-agent and let that bypass the cookie. Not ideal though...
You could also try getting rid of the cookie idea altogether: index.html is the disclaimer, index2.html is the actual front page, etc.
Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2006 2:39 pm
by piwanek
Unfortunately that doesn't work, since its all php and the index.php controls the whole site.
Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2006 3:23 pm
by Ambush Commander
Right. So take off the cookie protection, and make the "home" page the disclaimer page.
Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2006 4:06 pm
by piwanek
Unfortunately the disclaimer has a specific purpose, so it needs to be there.
I think we have taken care of it. According to Google WebMasters site, if you can browse the site in a text browser indexing should be fine. We have fixed the issues at hand and hopefully indexing should be no problem now.
Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2006 7:19 pm
by RobertGonzalez
So if your users don't have javascript enabled they can't use your site?
Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2006 8:20 pm
by aaronhall
Everah wrote:So if your users don't have javascript enabled they can't use your site?
Cookies*

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2006 10:41 am
by RobertGonzalez
Sorry, I asked that question in a different way than it sounded in my head...
What I meant was that if a user chooses to not accept cookies, then they cannot use the site.
Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2006 2:20 pm
by piwanek
We decided to remove the cookie all together.
Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2006 2:46 pm
by bokehman
Ambush Commander wrote:Sniff Google's user-agent and let that bypass the cookie.
Sites that serve google content different from that it serves other user agents will be delisted if google finds out.
Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 8:50 am
by Mordred
piwanek wrote:Unfortunately the disclaimer has a specific purpose, so it needs to be there.
How do you plan on making GoogleBot agree to the disclaimer then?
piwanek wrote:We decided to remove the cookie all together.
That, or allow cookie-less browsing. Session ID-s can be propagated in the URLs for example.