Tailored pages to users refered by Search Engines

[wha]

Hi, We are considering using the search keywords passed in the referrer string to "seed" a search on our site and instead of a generic homepage we would serve up a page of search results for the term that the user searched on to get to the site in the first place. Several people in our group are concerned about being blacklisted by Search Engines for doing this. I think this is baseless: I think our doing this would *add* value to the Search Engine and to our site - but it's a matter of interpretation I suppose. And if someone at a search engine interprets this to be cloaking then I can see the risk. Can anyone comment on this? Does anyone know of any major sites that tailor their pages like this?
thanks!

[grnidone]

Welcome to the forums, Wha!

I moved your post from "Breaking Search Engine News" to this thread, because I felt it would get more response in this forum.

Since I don't know the answer to your question, I will rally the troops for you..

-G

[wha]

thanks, hopefully some people know about this....

[littleman]

Wha, it is a grate question. I wouldn't call this process cloaking in the nature of it's purpose, though It is using similar technology. I would not serve up an entirely different page, but instead change a portion of the page and leave the look and feel of the page the same. On the technical end, I think a script like this would be relatively easy to write, but high maintenance -- because you will have to keep up with the parsing of the ever changing referrer strings.

[grnidone]

Wha,

Littleman didn't mean that your post was "grating" on the nerves...

He meant that the question was a good one.

Just to clarify

-G

[Woz]

Wha, I agree, that's a great idea!

Dunno how to do it, but it's a great idea!

Let us know how you go.

Onya
Woz

[roscoepico]

PHP?

[wha]

Actually we've already implemented the solution in ASP. I'm sure PHP would work well too.

[PeteU]

how would you protect against someone feeding your script with trademarked phrases as referrals?

[Air]

What do you intend to serve a search engine spider, if there is no referer then serve the original page submitted?

[Fusioneer]

Yes this is possible and I have written something similar in Cold Fusion, you just rip the kw terms out of the referrer string and pass them to your template as a query string.

As each referrer string is different for each engine you need code to identify each engine first [not too hard - search for unique string. ie. google.com] and then grab whatever follows the "?" in the URL as a "&" delimited list (ie. for google grab text following "q?=" and "&") and wham you have keywords and all search parameters which you can pass to your template as a query.

Of course if you are cloaking and redirecting to a home page you may want to serve up content directly relevant to the search term which in this case may not appear on the home page.

In some ways it is still better to create themed pages for keywords which will have relevant content for search terms rather than scripting like this.

Just my 1.5c.;)