How to prevent bot/googlebot indexing promotional home page? - googlebot

Question

We have an e-commerce website. Due to some marketing and promotional campaign we are showing app download page/banner/promotion/big image (and nothing else) on our home page if the user is visiting the site for the first time which is cookie based.
But I don't want bots/crawler to see this content(big image) instead they should see the real content which comes after setting up the cookie. URL is same for both the content.
I can clarify more on this. How can I avoid the bots seeing the promotional content?

Answer 1

You need a robots.txt file.
From Wikipedia:
The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to advising cooperating web crawlers and other web robots about accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard is different from, but can be used in conjunction with, Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.
Bear in mind that robots can simply ignore these directives if they are "evil"; however, Google and other search engines should abide by it provided you set it up correctly.

Answer 2

Well now I am using this function to detect bots/crawlers in php controller code and do the redirection as needed.
function bot_detected()
{
if
(
!isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])
||
empty($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])
||
preg_match('/bot|crawl|slurp|spider/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])
||
preg_match('/scrappy/python/httpclient/Googlebot|DoCoMo|YandexBot|bingbot|ia_archiver|AhrefsBot|Ezooms|GSLFbot|WBSearchBot|Twitterbot|TweetmemeBot|Twikle|PaperLiBot|Wotbox|UnwindFetchor|facebookexternalhit/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])
)
{
return TRUE;
}
return FALSE;
}