2.44. RobotUA *global*

The RobotUA directive defines a list of User Agents which will be classed as crawler robots (search engines) and causes Interchange to alter its behavior to improve the chance of Interchange-served content being crawled and listed.

The directive accepts a wildcard list - * represents any number of characters, ? represents a single character. The elements of the list are separated by a comma.

If a User Agent is recognised as a robot, the following will be performed by Interchange:

• mv_tmp_session scratch variable is set to 1, causing sessions to be disabled and therefore avoiding the writing of session data to disk.
• mv_no_session_id scratch variable is set to 1, causing Interchange to generate URLs without a session id (eg. mv_session_id=KvWna2PT).
• mv_no_count scratch variable is set to 1, causing Interchange to generate URLs without an incremental number, normally used to prevent proxy caching (eg. mv_pc=4).

It should be noted that once you have identified you are serving a page to a robot, you should not use this to massively alter your page content in an attempt to improve your ranking. If you do this, you stand the chance of being blacklisted. You have been warned!

Example:

  RobotUA   Inktomi, Scooter, *Robot*, *robot*, *Spider*, *spider*

See also RobotIP.