Are CAS redirects incompatible with Google web crawler?

[Kristin Coles]

Thanks for a quick reply Scott! :)

All our webpages fall into two categories...

Category 1: 90% of all our pages fall into this category. They DO
NOT require any security. Howevever, they present additional content if you
are logged in. Hence, these pages use GATEWAY=TRUE parameter while accessing
CAS

Category 2: 10% of all our pages fall into this category. They DO require
you to be logged in to access them.

In essence, all our pages use CAS. Hence the problem impacts all our pages.
This has caused the rank of our webpages to suffer a great deal.

Previously (i.e., before a Single Sign-On solution was put in place) we used
a simple Java Bean solution which used to check whether a Login Bean existed
in the user session. This worked fine with search engines.

I really like the concept of CAS and the way it has been working for us.
However, you wouldn't want the business to suffer due to poor search engine
rankings.

Hope there are people out there who encountered something similar and
figured a way around.

Thanks again!
Kristin.



On Dec 20, 2007 5:12 PM, Scott Battaglia <scott.battaglia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Kristin,
>
> Was your previous application secured in any way?  My guess would be that
> any application that requires authentication would find it difficult to be
> crawled. If there are parts of your site that do not require security, you
> can ensure that the CAS clients are not protecting those pages.
>
> We're not concerned with whether Google crawls our secure web sites, so
> I've never encountered this error.
>
> -Scott
>
>   On Dec 20, 2007 6:45 PM, Kristin Coles < kristin.coles at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >   Hi guys,
> > I have a working Single Sign On solution (which wouldn't have been
> > possible without this forum). However this made our webpages incompatible
> > with Google's web crawler (Googlebot)? When I use "Google Webmaster tools"
> > too see our website logs, I now see thousands of Redirect error messages
> > (which weren't there before the Single Sign On).
> >
> > http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35157
> >
> > According to the above link, I should "Minimize the number of redirects
> > needed to follow a link from one page to another" to avoid the Redirect
> > error messages.
> >
> > Right now, I am redirecting 3 times for every page visit.
> > 1. Redirect to the CAS server to get a ticket.
> > 2. Redirect back to the page (service url) from the CAS server
> > 3. Self-redirect without the ticket parameter
> >
> > Is this a common problem with a simple solution? Can anyone please tell
> > me how to get over this hurdle.
> >
> > Thank you!
> > Kristin
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > cas at tp.its.yale.edu
> > http://tp.its.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/cas
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> -Scott Battaglia
>
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottbattaglia
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>
>
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