Redirect for browser compatibility limits google crawl

[seoram]

My client has a site which has google services. The only problem is that site site is only IE compatiable. Here is what he has done.
as soon as the URL is served in the brower, the site checks for browser compatiability and if its only IE then the url redirect will be done to /login/home.aspx. The problem is Google is not crawling the site completly. What is that I can do?

Thanks for your suggession in advance

[tedster]

Sounds like the problem might how the browser detection is done. Googlebot is not IE, it is its own unique user agent -- so if you have pages that lock out any user agent except IE, then you have locked out all search engine crawlers, including googlebot, slurp, msnbot and so on.

What technical approach do you use?

One way I like to do this kind of "sniffing" is to stand the normal logic on its head -- that is, serve the IE page as the default, but sniff for specific other browsers and redirect them to an IE-only message. This approach may miss a very few user agents, but it has the advantage of letting the search engine bots crawl unobstructed.

Of course the ideal is to be cross-browser compatible. But I do understand that some sites make intensive use of IE-only functionality for various reasons.