My problem is I want the spyder bot to map pages of articles that use .asp code to validate if they have a user cookie. If they have a cookie they get the article. If they do not have the cookie then a page asking them to join is displayed. Will the spyder bots map the article pages even though the bot doesn't have a cookie?

I don't think spiders will index cookie dependent sections of a site. If you want a spider to come in, then create an exception for the user-agents that you want to allow. This can be done in PHP, ASP, or Javascript, and isn't very hard to implement.

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Well that will also depend on if you want these people to view your cashed pages or not. If you are selling the content of that article to other customers and don't want them to be able to access it without first paying then you may think of doing something like showing only part of the content to the spiders just so that they can grab those pages.

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Nah, cloak it like WMW does,

example
if Googlebot or cookie pass straight through
if no googlebot or no cookie send to registration or login, quite simple

This is an exceptable instance of cloaking (Not the bad cloaking) and also make sure you insert a pragma no cache in your header so that they cant just get the info by viewing the cached page

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Sweet Morgan,

I didn't know you can say no cache to google and it wouldn't cashe the page.

Does that affect page ranking at all? i'm guess not but not sure.

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