Re: Blatantly Evil Question

Jochem Maas wrote:

Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:

robots.txt will not do what you want it to. Just sniff for those robots' User-Agents (Google, MSN and Yahoo all publish their UA strings on their websites, AFAIK) and send different content if it's one of those.

they will hammer you for it eventually - AFAICT all major SEs send out their spiders occasionally with faked user-agent strings - to catch out crap like this. oh and the guy that invented php is a really bigcheese down at yahoo... and he reads this list :-) though I doubt he has the time or desire to chase you personally. I would recommend you don't go down this road. it's bad for your business in the longer term and its bad for the web because your filling it with shite.

Of course it is, but in his original post he said that he realised that it was bad, and he didn't want to hear reasons not to do it. I would never even attempt to do something like this on a website of my own -- as I said in an off-list email to this guy (it was OT for the list) it's going to harm his website more than help it. It's not exactly hard for the search engines to detect cloaking. Jasper