Is this user-agent redirect legal for Google?

Will I get banned forever?

[chaynes68]

I have a site with PR4 or 5 depending which way the wind is blowing. We have been around for years and have never done any SEO work. Here's my problem:

We have a bunch of great sites that we host stores for. The link to each store is:

[widget.com...]

Google is not picking up any of these links to us which is a shame because these links are on the home pages of PR6 and better sites! I assume Google is unable to deal with the querystring values.

Its simply not practical to ask all these sites to change their links to us. The solution I am thinking about is to detect the user agent and basically send anything that is not IE, NS, FF, Safari, or opera to our home page with a 301 (http://www.widget.com). This home page sells a superset of the things sold in the stores that we host...so we're not misrepresenting to the spiders the site content.....just making sure they understand what the site is about. I also like the idea of having control on what part of my site the spider sees first.

This method sounds a lot like cloaking to me so I am a little reluctant to try it. I know the search engines frown on this sort of thing.

Comments? Suggesions?

Chris

[ogletree]

What makes you think Google is not picking them up? If you are going by the link: command that means nothing. That command is worthless and is useless for any real information. Try doing a search for that exact url with "" around it and see how many restults come up.

[abacuss]

Even i am facing the same problem here.I had some of my sites submitted as [asdf.com...] and [asdf.com...] as a result google is seeing them as two different pages and obviously two different page ranks.

Suggest a better way to tackle this situation.

[Key_Master]

It might have something to do with the id= portion of the url.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[ogletree]

I put

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [domain.com...] [R=301,L]

to fix the the www and non www problem.