Hi,
Is it possible to place a rel=canonical on a page that can only be tracked by MSNbot and rest of agents (googlebot or slup yahoo etc) should ignor it?
Anyone? Do it need to do something in robots.txt file?
Let's suppose I've a url myurl.com, all bots come to this page myurl.com/index.html, I placed a canonical to redirect bot (not users) to another link myurl.com/mybest.html. What I want is that only MSN bot should honor this canonical but at the same time I do not want other search engines bots to stop crawling my site as usual.
Please advise any solution?
Not suggested. If you are showing one page to humans and another to MSNbot, you will get flagged.
~B
*I no longer work for Bing.
Brett Yount thanks for your reply. But....
When I'm setting up Canoncial that means I'm properly & legalling transferring index.html standing to mybest.html as I know in case of same or identical content it is best to guide agent bot which url I prefer out of so many same content ones, it is what a canonical is for, to take it to your preferred url.
Actually I do not want MSNbot to show index.html in their serach results but rather show mybest.html and at the same time I want any goodstanding of index.html should shift to mybest.html because content is almost the same only I want preferred url for my bing visitors that is mybest.html instead of index.html, hope it explains my situation.
Waiting for further feedback and suggests.
(edited) currently, we do not support for the canonical tag. The way you described it above in your original post looked like you wanted to send humans and most bots to one page and MSNbot to another which is cloaking. Maybe I'm missing something here, but is there a reason why you don't want to or can't just redirect the page using a 301?
A 301 redirect looks like best option for you at the moment.
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Putting Canonical tag will tell Google, Yahoo and Bing about your preferred URL. There is no separate Canonical element for Bing and other SEs.
Can you share with us the reason why you like to show Bing a separate page ?
Putting a 301 redirect may not help as you mentioned that you only want Bing to see the other page where users, Google etc see the normal index.html page.
One possible solution will be to block MSN from crawling/indexing index.html via robots.txt file.
User-agent: msnbotDisallow: /index.html
Then in the sitemap that you will submit to Bing Webmaster Center, mention the URL with mybest.html.
If the content on index.html and mybest.html is same, then why do you wish to block MSN from indexing index.html?
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I dont understand why you would not support such a tag? Wouldn't this make your crawling easier and your index more accurate? Didn't you say in January of last year that you would support it?