Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

To Cloak or Not To Cloak

hiding a legit javascript redirect..

         

fidibidabah

3:38 am on Jun 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



My entire content driven website is compatible with all resolutions, with 1 exception. The Index. Because of this, I have two different indexes, one for 1024 widths and >, and one for 800 widths and <. The default is the 1024 and up and it forwards as needed.

I have no idea how this is going to effect the spyders as of yet, since I just launched the site. I don't want the "lite" version to get spydered, because then higher resolution users get the wrong verson (which works, but isn't as nice), yet if I 'disallow' the "lite" version in robots.txt, then the bot might get confused. Being on a site, can't get to the site it's being autoforwaded to, meaning that I get 0 pages indexed.

I guess what I'm asking is, when I query the resolution of a bot (specifically just the major engines), what do I get back? Is this a situation where I should cloak or is there a better option?

Note: Please move this is it is better suited in an SE forum.

volatilegx

7:21 pm on Jun 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Well, for one thing, there is no way to tell -- "server-side" -- what the resolution of a viewer's browser is. The browser resolution isn't sent as part of standard HTTP headers, so server-side cloaking isn't going to help you.

You could possibly use JavaScript to determine the resolution of the browser, and load different stylesheets based on the resolution of the browser.

That's probably how I'd handle it.