user agent delivery

[bigblock]

Didn't know where to put this one...

I'm toying with the concept of serving one set of pages to users who are accessing my site with a browser, and another set to users who are accessing my site through any other method.

There would be no spider names used, and no IP addresses used. Spiders would fall into the "default" (non-browser) category, and would get a text page which would accurately represent the content on the corresponding graphical page (which would accurately represent the content on the corresponding text page ;) ).

The implication (kinda) is that I'm giving one page to humans, and one to non-humans.

I'm just playing with this. Ideas? Anyone done this before?

[Advisor]

Alan would probably be the man to talk to. I think Highman also. It should be perfectly fine, but too technical for me to give you a good answer!

J

[ihelpyou]

Well, if you say it in that context you are deceiving, imo. If you would say 'i wish to show one page to users with graphics turned off, and one page to users with graphics on', you would be better off. :)

As long as you are not tracking IP's(spider ip) you should be okay. Your biggest problem will be when a humas views the cache page on Google and finds it different.

[bigblock]

i wish to show one page to users with graphics turned off, and one page to users with graphics on

So many things in SEO boil down to wording. No, really ;). The above may not be accurate, because users can turn graphics off in their browsers, and I don't know how to detect that (is it even reasonably detectable?). Then, they would still be getting the graphics-included page, sans graphics.

If someone were to report me to google, do they actually have a human google employee look at my site in a browser, or do they send an IP that isn't on the spider trap lists to examine my page? If they send an IP, I'd be fine (it would find identical content as the initial Google spidering IP), and if they send a human with a browser, what would that human think? Does that human appreciate the difference between cloaking and spamming?

[ihelpyou]

Well, if a human is sent because of a complaint, you can bet it will be the one human who does do that from time to time, and more often than not. If that is the case, oh yes, he/she can tell if you are trying to deceive. :D

A question to you might be; Why would you even think about this kind of thing? Not sure what good could come of it, but I can think of lots of bad.

[bigblock]

Well, if a human is sent because of a complaint, you can bet it will be the one human who does do that from time to time

Indeed. Murphy and I go waaaaaayyy back.

This wasn't really intended specifically as a spam question, although there are certainly some spam implications here. I figured I'd toss it in the content forum, instead of in spam/ethics.

I was just thinking how crappy my site looks in Lynx, and maybe I could serve a different version to Lynx, which led to...there are a lot of "users" who examine my site as Lynx does, so maybe I could give them one version, and the graphical users another, etc, etc. I think lots of good could come of it. Down the line, I'd like to deliver separate pages based on tons of variables, like platform, browser, screen reso, language, css compatibility, etc. The list goes on, but I figured this was a decent start.

No doubt someone else has thunk the same thought?

[lots0cash]

Hey BB, I don't know if this is exactly what you are looking for but, but I believe it might be configured to do what you want.
click here (www.lots0cash.com/keyword/keyword.shtml)

[bigblock]

thanks lots0cash -- but I think keyword delivery is only used to deliver content based on the referring search term. Agent delivery is actually fairly easy to implement, either via perl, javascript, or an XSSI statement.

I have some mixed feelings about keyword delivery. On the one hand, it has the potential to provide an awesome interface. On the other, it could be said that it is circumventing the authority of the search engine in deciding what content should be associated with each keyword query.

[Alan Perkins]

Hi bb

In your first post you saidThe implication (kinda) is that I'm giving one page to humans, and one to non-humans.In that case it would be spam.

However, you also saidThere would be no spider names used, and no IP addresses used. Spiders would fall into the "default" (non-browser) category ...

I was just thinking how crappy my site looks in Lynx, and maybe I could serve a different version to Lynx, which led to...So, some humans would see it! In that case, IMO, what you are talking about doing with agent delivery is not spam per se.

However I am reliably informed that Google would view it as spam. IMO they have based their point of view on practical constraints.

[bigblock]

thanks Alan -- I was hoping you would jump in on this one :).

Yes, some humans would see it. I understand why Google has to summarily view it as spam though.

I'd like to explore this and play with it a little, but I'll probably be too afraid of getting banned to experiment. Lovely.