Redirect for Search Engines (googlebot et.al.)

[Brice Figureau]

Hi,

On Tue, 2007-10-02 at 06:05 +0200, Malte Sussdorff wrote:
> Will something like this work ?
> 
> location / {
> 	if {$http_user_agent ~ Googlebot} {
> 	 	proxy_pass http://search_engines;
>          }
> }
> 
> Furthermore, is there a way to make this global for the server across  
> all locations (as I have 25 of them, so I would have to add the code  
> on each). Last but not least can I provide a variable with a list of  
> user_agents (as there are a ton of search engines)?

We are using the following snippet (but not to solve the same problem as
you) in a file we are including in each server {} block.

        if ( $http_user_agent ~* \b(:?googlebot|webcrawler|<add here the other user_agents>)\b ) {
                rewrite ^(.*)$  /friendly-spider/$1;
        }
        
        location ^~ /friendly-spider/ {
                rewrite ^/friendly-spider/(.*)$ $1 last;
        	... do what you want here...	
        }

I guess you can use a proxy_pass in the location section.
There are certainly more efficient ways to do that, but that one is working.
-- 
Brice Figureau <brice+nginx at daysofwonder.com>