anyone tried a bot dependant 301?

am i breaching google tos?

[nippi]

I have a client who has sold their bed and breakfast, the new owner wants to use it as a house, so they have basically told me to dump the site.

I am planning to 301 googlebot to site A. and all other engines to site B.

Site A. is just outside google top 10 for a relevant term the B&B site ranks on, and would likely go top 10 with the 301 redirect, whilst site B. is in a similar position, except with msn.

Is this OK? Am I cloaking? Breaching terms of service?

Anyone?

[tedster]

Yes, this is a kind of cloaking. To be safe, put a single 301 in place for every user agent, whether bot or browser. Otherwise there is a serious risk, to my view.

[nippi]

ok, well, can that idea then

[helpnow]

However, a common way to address session id issues is to use 301s which are bot specific. So, I think a proper use of bot specific 301s is appropriate, and thus, there is no general penalty against this. Depends on what you are doing with it.

Anyone disagree with me?

[tedster]

You do have a point there - but sending bots from different search engines to different target domains is a whole other thing. I really doubt that would pass inspection.

[activeco]

If you provide different content to users coming from different engines, then you have the valid point.

[nippi]

yes, it is different content.

bed and breakfast business a
bed and breakfast business b.

its worth quite abit of cash if I can make it work, but will cost me more if the two target sites are penalised

[activeco]

I mean if you send all users coming from Google as the referrer to the site A (the site Googlebot sees) and all other users to site B (the site other robots visit) then you are ethically and technically not spammer. :)

However, I am still not sure about corresponding SERP reactions. Basically, it is the same as keeping domains apart with different permissions in their robots.txt files, which would be much safer option.

Anything else is just SE spamming.

[nippi]

What I am trying to do, is basically just a twist on the philosophy of

a. Create a website. Set it for google.
b, Duplicate all pages. Place them in a seperate folder. Set them for MSN.
c. ditto for Yahoo.

When a search engine hits the home page, detect, and 301 the bot to the correct folder.

Seems pretty similar?

[activeco]

So, A -> 301 to B for one search engine;
B -> 301 to A for other bots.

A & B having identical content.

It seems regular to me. Seeing relatively frequent complaints of not being fully credited after doing 301, your solution is very clever.

If you want to try it, I would, as noted earlier, be sure that all visitors coming from one engine land on the corresponding domain too.
The only slight problem could be visitors without SE referrer, which in case of some hand checking, could raise eyebrowns.

Maybe you could implement it starting with MSN and see the results, limiting the eventual damage.
Also starting immediately (if they already have the same content), I would forbid other robots on (correct) domains, to escape duplicate penalties and de-indexing.

[Woz]

Why don't you split the old site in two, 301 half to newsite A and 301 the other half to newsite B? Then there is no cloaking, both newsites get benefit (albeit reduced a little), and there is no danger of a cloaking ban. You could also be selective on which parts of the old site you send to which newsite to get the most benefit for each according to what is needed for each.

Just a thought.

Onya
Woz

[activeco]

Why don't you split the old site in two, 301 half to newsite A and 301 the other half to newsite B?

He would risk losing on-page factors and you never know how G would react on that.
Besides, as I see it, he already have different content, ranking well on different engines.
True, if doing 301 to another content anyway, it is always a kind of gambling. So, merging content and implementing OP's idea could be an interesting adventure. :-0

However, in case of former B&B, merging is probably out of question.

[nippi]

to clarify

Site a and b have same TOPIC different content.

I don't want to 301 half site to one, and half to the other, as fact is, home is the most valuable, by far.

I have for now, decided not to do it, as cost of penalty is too high, but I am going to try it with a test site instead.