have google egnore cookies

[wishwarriorx]

Hello, i have a script setup so that a cookie is placed on a users machine when they access my site, if no cookie has been placed it redirects them to a advertisment page. then after 10 seconds redirects them to the url they were trying to go to originaly. this cookie is deleted every 24 hours. my problem with this is google gets stuck here and will not index the rest of my site past the first page because of the cookie redirect.

so my question is how can i code this so that if google, (or any other search spider) can be excluded from this advertisment redirect cookie and continue to index my website.

if needed i can post my current code i created for the cookie. really need help cant find anything on this subject.

[drew010]

search engines send a User-Agent header identifying themselves.
http://www.jafsoft.com/searchengines/webbots.html#search_engine_robots_and_others

you can use $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] to determine if its one of them.

a little warning, serving pages differently to search engines is called cloaking and they will sometimes delete your site from lists of sites to spider if their mechanisms see you are doing so.

[kburger]

If it's Google's spider, you should be able to find out from $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. Look for the string 'Googlebot'.

[wishwarriorx]

would it be something as simle as doing if $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] == "modzilla" then check for the cookie else let the user through. cause from what i have seen all user that user a browser have a user agent of modzilla, were as search engines dont.

would this be a possable way of doing this.

so do it like so

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] == "Mozilla")
	{
		if(!isset($_COOKIE['cookiead']))
    	{
    		$refer = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
			setcookie("cookiead",1, time()+86400, "/" , $host);
    		setcookie("refer",$refer, time()+3600, "/" , $host);
    		Header("Location: http://" . $host . "/cookieadd.php");
    	}
	}

i tried this but now normal user who dont have the cookie are able to get through without viewing the add first so im thinking i dont quite have it right.

[kburger]

I think you meant Mozilla.

Well I think that's probably a bad way to do it. You'll probably be excluding a lot of people from your site. I think a better option would be to do that in reverse. Make the exception for the spiders. Maybe something like - create an array of the more popular spiders' User Agents and handle the special cases separately.

[wishwarriorx]

ok thats true i saposed it would exclude allot of people, i mostly just want the major search engines to have access and the other i dont care if they blocked.

so like

google,
yahoo,
msn,
altavista
aol

what would the user agnet for these search engines be.

also im still a bit of a new php scripter i can usually edit just about anything but not to good and creating new scripts. how would i go about creating an array for this exactly?

[kburger]

In your code above you're checking to see if the User Agent is exactly "Mozilla". It will never be exactly "Mozilla". You'll need to check if "Mozilla" is in $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. Other than that it looks OK.

For example, my User Agent at the moment is

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

[wishwarriorx]

so something like this

if (!strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Googlebot'))
	{
		if(!isset($_COOKIE['cookiead']))
    	{
    		$refer = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
			setcookie("cookiead",1, time()+86400, "/" , $host);
    		setcookie("refer",$refer, time()+3600, "/" , $host);
    		Header("Location: http://" . $host . "/cookieadd.php");
    	}
	}

or should i go with this

if (strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Mozilla'))
	{
		if(!isset($_COOKIE['cookiead']))
    	{
    		$refer = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
			setcookie("cookiead",1, time()+86400, "/" , $host);
    		setcookie("refer",$refer, time()+3600, "/" , $host);
    		Header("Location: http://" . $host . "/cookieadd.php");
    	}
	}

if i choose to enter the searchengines in how would i do that in an array?

EDIT:

ok i tried mozilla and it doesnt work but search engine one (top does so i guess i just need to know how to place a list of the search engines in an array)

[kburger]

$spiders = array('Googlebot', 'MSNBOT', 'Whatever Other Spider');
if (FALSE === strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], $spiders)) 

...untested

[wishwarriorx]

well i tried

$spiders = array('Googlebot', 'MSNBOT', 'FAST-WebCrawler', 'Gigabot', 'YahooSeeker', 'ZyBorg');
	if (!strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] , $spiders))
	{
		if(!isset($_COOKIE['cookiead']))
    	{
    		$refer = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
			setcookie("cookiead",1, time()+86400, "/" , $host);
    		setcookie("refer",$refer, time()+3600, "/" , $host);
    		Header("Location: http://" . $host . "/cookieadd.php");
    	}
	}

seems to work form the users standpoint. is there a way to test this to see if it works from a web crawler standpoint.

[kburger]

strstr() won't work since it expects two strings as parameters. You'll need to use strpos() like I posted.

Well, if you really wanted to you could fake the User Agent. I'll leave that up to you.

[wishwarriorx]

oh yeah forgot to change that :\ my bad....

is there anyway for me to test to make sure the redirect doesnt happen for the spiders

[kburger]

Yes. Like I said, you could fake it if you really wanted to. I'll leave that up to you. If you're using Firefox, probably the easiest way would be to use an extension that allows you to change its User Agent. Or you could write a script that would do the same thing.

[wishwarriorx]

ok i get ya 🙂 thanks guys for your help. been a big help