Agent based cloak

Is this practice feasible?

[feeder]

I saw this topic discussed on another board and wondered what you guys thought.

Detect if user is using Mozilla, Opera whatever.

If not, serve a text version of the site. No spam. Only difference is that the site is all text. I have no problem with the Google cache showing this. The "justification" is that the text site is there for non-graphical browsers such as Lynx.

I take it the search engines wouldn't approve?

[Air]

It would probably be ok, but I think you'd end up with inconsistent results. There are enough spiders using Mozilla, lwp, etc. that some of the time they'd grab your text only page and at other times get the page with the "works".

Also since it's so visible a technique, if you are successful with it, you'll probably draw a lot of unwanted attention.

[feeder]

Cheers Air.

So you're saying the spiders will sometimes come in on a Mozilla (etc...) user agent?

[Air]

>...will sometimes come in on a Mozilla (etc...) user agent?

Yeah, they do sometimes.