I'm not sure whether or not this has been talked about before. Does anyone try to stop a "shadow" spider posing as a browser by disallowing Mozilla/* in their robots.txt? If so (assuming it works), wouldn't this jeopardize their potential ranking.
Brett_Tabke
5:13 pm on Feb 13, 2002 (gmt 0)
Spiders that read robots.txt will only look for their unique id. I can't see Mozilla/ getting many spiders. However, have a look...I do use it here: www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt
Air
3:00 am on Feb 14, 2002 (gmt 0)
Most of the spiders fond of using alternate User Agents have been identified, the ususal method is to detect them by IP and feed them the cloaked page.
It's a good thought though, if they did look for and follow robots.txt for Mozilla, or whatever User Agent they happen to be using, it sure would make it easier to just block them.
