Forum Moderators: phranque
I have a website that at every session start redirects to a page that checks to see the client browser supports session cookies and has javascript enabled. After these checks are performed this page is never invoked again.
What I would like to know is what the impacts are of such a redirection at session-start on web crawling bots? Can they handle it well, or should I just abandon this 'session-check' altogether and adopt a more conventional way (no checking)?
Thank you.
Doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Jim
Never give a search engine spider a session unless you want big trouble.
Thanks to all of your replies.
Dave
How you do this depends on what server you're running on and/or what language you're using to write your code.
If you're using an off-the-shelf software package, have a look through the documentation and/or the on-line FAQs. This is a common situation, and pre-made solutions may be readily available.
Jim
Simple method: Examine the User-agent header sent by the client in its HTTP requests to your server.
Better: Examine that 'claimed' User-agent, and verify that with a reverse-DNS lookup on the client's IP address to be sure the User-agent is a genuine one and not a spoof.How you do this depends on what server you're running on and/or what language you're using to write your code.
If you're using an off-the-shelf software package, have a look through the documentation and/or the on-line FAQs. This is a common situation, and pre-made solutions may be readily available.
Jim
I'm using custom made scripts in PHP and using Apache v2 on Linux, so I don't think it will be a problem to implement this. Thanks for the help Jim.
