opinions needed on php redirect

will the se spiders follow redirect?

[iggy99]

lets sat we put the following header on our se submition pages...

will the page get spidered or will the spider be rediredted?

<?PHP

$newlocation=header("Location: [webmasterworld.com...] or
die("Unable to send page. I must've already sent something to the
browser");

?>

[Air]

That will produce a standard 302 header status code, which is the same as a meta redirect. The engines will treat it as each handles a re-direct, i.e. some will follow, and some will stop.

[iggy99]

air, thanks for the speedy response...

i have an idea, lets call it the poor boy cloak.

how about we put asp line

<% Response.Redirect("http://www.webpage.com") %>

or the php as above, enable the server parsing of php orr asp on html page with some sort of htaccess file, submit our pages, watch for spiders, then enable the php or asp with the htaccess?

how would one write such a htaccess file for unix?

i know this is not exactly cloaking, but for what we want to do, i think it would work well!

many thanks for your thoughts

[Air]

Not sure what you mean Iggy, if you are using ASP then you aren't using Apache or .htaccess.

To avoid setting the redirection code which the spiders will detect, it would be better to read the content from a file and write it out after you have detected who the visitor is rather than doing a redirection as you described.

[Fusioneer]

For best results, never use redirection, just serve different content based on who is visiting.

We use Cold Fusion, but you can do similar in ASP and PHP though I'm not sure if at works as well.