Alternative style for search engines to save bandwidth

[dartho]

I wrote a style for small screen devices which requires a fraction of the bandwidth of vbulletin's default.

I also wrote an add-on which detects many small screen devices and forces the style on them.

I then modified that add-on so that it detects Yahoo spiders, and forces the lightweight style on them also.

My site isn't a big site (there are often more spiders than users on) - but I was consistently using abut 30GB bandwidth a month (slowly increasing as the site grows), this has now dropped to about 20GB. Good hosting in Australia costs good money, and the less bandwidth I waste, the better.

I'm considering doing the same for google and other spiders, but am concerned. I've read that if you display different content to Google search engines, they may drop you from their search engines. In this case, the content is the same - just the layout is different.

Any SEO/Search Engine experts have any opinion/knowledge? I experimented with Yahoo as my ranking with them was average - it's actually improved since starting this test almost a year ago, but I think that may just be coincidence.

[SEOvB]

Most spiders don't download images to begin with so you won't save that much if any at all. Your Yahoo increase is probably just coincidence.

You can however display a more SEO friendly style by limiting the over all page sizes (increase loading times) by removing javascript, flash animations, etc etc, and improving the content to code ratio. Both are only small ranking factors though but if you do enough small ones, it starts to help over competitors who do not.

Displaying different content is just that, different content. If you display a page about horses to Google and then when a visitor is there its about Dogs you'll be penalized.

[dartho]

I've tested a few times and turned it off for a day - bandwidth usage spiked significantly on all 3 occasions I did this.

Images themselves are not a particularly large percentage of the bandwidth required to display a vbulletin page - it's the tables, css, white space, comments and other formatting that really blows it out.

My forumhome page (without images) is 105,316 bytes. Using the lightweight style, the same page is only 7,659 bytes.

[SEOvB]

Originally Posted by dartho

I've tested a few times and turned it off for a day - bandwidth usage spiked significantly on all 3 occasions I did this.

Images themselves are not a particularly large percentage of the bandwidth required to display a vbulletin page - it's the tables, css, white space, comments and other formatting that really blows it out.

My forumhome page (without images) is 105,316 bytes. Using the lightweight style, the same page is only 7,659 bytes.

Agreed, if you can present the same data and information to the bots with only 7.659 bytes by removing the css, tables, javascript and all that other load of formatting, you'll be better off.