Eliminate costly callbacks and SEO

Question

We have a website that makes expensive calls to the rear system to display product availability. I would like to remove these calls for page views that are not actual customers. My first thought was to filter out the user agent, and if the requester is a search engine search engine with spiders, to display "Call for availability" or some such message (which will be the same message that we will display if the backend systems were unavailable for service or not available at all) instead of calling the backend system for real availability.

In discussions with people, it seems that a big concern about the accessibility icon (a very small icon, mind you) is different from what is scanned when the user views or requests a page - that we can be fined for hiding search engines.

Since the information we show is a very small image icon, and we do not offer completely different materials for search engines and users in real time, I really do not see disguise as a problem, but I would like to get some external perspective.

Is simulating a script of “inaccessible information” for acceptable search engine practices when the overall content of the page does not change or will still qualify in some way as cloaking?

Answer 1

Why don't you make the “information” that you display, use javascript / ajax. Thus, when a page is loaded through a browser that does not support javascript (for example, a search robot), this “expensive call” is not made.

Alternatively, you can post this information in IFRAME on your page. And exclude indexing of the page shown in IFRAME via robots.txt, or META / robots tag .

Both approaches are completely white hat, although I think the second is more than that.