Bot Recognition

[CyberFreak]

Most forum softwares (most new anyway) have a feature where the forum can detect search bots by their useragent so they can show on the who's online list and also so you can control what they see separately from what guests see.

I have found that alot of people don't seem to like the bots showing on the index page and there is quite often topics on phpBB.com especially asking how t stop them showing.

Do you like bots being shown online and do you find the fact bots are being highlighted as a good thing or does it annoy you always seeing Google [bot] and so on at the bottom?

 

[Merlin]

Not really, but do you think it's a good idea to allow them to view everything guests can?

 

[CyberFreak]

I think in some forums it doesn't matter as there is nothing they want to hide from guest or bots specifically so both the bots and the guests can have the same permissions. Some cases you may want bots to view more for example if you have some forums you only want registered users to see you could then allow bots to still read the forums even though guests can't.

 

[ℓєσ gнσѕт]

^That is a very good point. For example, on BlueHumor.org I had it set so that only members could view the humor topics, not guests. Bots were also allowed. This really does help alot with signups.

 

[spyka]

Showing different content to bots is 'illegal' in terms of SEO. It's called cloaking - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking:

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

And it will get you banned from google: http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... er=35769#2:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

So be careful if you use bots to show different content to guests/other users 😉

 

[Watch Me Sink]

I don't care if members see them, but I only allow myself to see what bots are online, since some might think they are spambots ~lol~

 

[ℓєσ gнσѕт]

I wouldn't call it cloaking, as the content is shown to full users, Moderators, Uber Members, and the Admins. Since that's the larger group of my users, I see it being illegal to show the same content as I show to guests, which would be the smaller traffic group.

If Google says anything, I would be willing to fight it with their support team -😉-

 

[CyberFreak]

I don't care if members see them, but I only allow myself to see what bots are online, since some might think they are spambots ~lol~

I have seen that mentioned many times around but i can never understand it... I don't see how people can think bots like Google, yahoo, msn and alexa and so on are spam bots. Surely people must have heard of msn, yahoo and google and so on?

 

[ℓєσ gнσѕт]

The majority of people do not understand, or care to understand for that matter, how a search engine collects the data. I have spoken to a few people on the matter at school and they think that the internet is located in a building, as no one has ever taught them about 'servers' and so fourth. They think that Google just uses the vast database to store and log the information it has on hand. They might have heard of 'bots' but the only kind that they know of is 'spam'. When they see 'Google [Bot]' on a forum, they simply think that it is a bot displaying a false name to not get banned.

It's the keyword 'bot' that is also related to the word 'spam' that matters. No different than doing a Google search for 'bot' in their mind (far strech I know) the term 'spam' is displayed in the title of many of the results.