[ic] IC and search engines

[Jonathan Clark]

> has anyone figured out a way to trick search engines into ranking the
> interchange pages?  looking at past logs, we used to get a lot of people
> finding us at google and other search engines, and ever since we started
> using interchange, our orders have gone down and our rankings have
> disappeared.  i would think that this would be a very important issue
> regarding interchange.  any ideas would be great.

I was thinking about this recently.. There is a (oft frowned upon) technique
used by some webmasters where different pages are delivered depending upon
the requesting browser id. This is used to deliver different content to
search engines than to the public, and is used primarily for ranking. (see
http://www.plus.ro/articles/page_cloaking.html for a description) I think
Google's 'cached' copy link in the results is a way of checking whether this
has been done. Generally, I think this sort of abuse of search engines
results in blacklisting, but if you were just to alter the links imho I
think noone would mind.

How about this:

In a page autoload subroutine, check the browser environmental variable. If
its a known search engine spider, use Pragma to turn off the session id. If
you wanted to get sneaky, you could set a scratch var which could then be
used in the rest of the page to alter content, add a link to the site map,
etc..

Jonathan
Webmaint.