PHP cookie设置为重定向，googlebot也重定向-如何阻止它？

Question

When a user hits domain.com for the first time, a cookie is set and they are redirected to domain.com/welcome (which is basically the index but with like an introduction animation that will only show once).

When a user visits the site a second time, it stays on domain.com and doesn't go to domain.com/welcome anymore because the cookie has been set already.

Easy enough. To test it, go to http://lansana.me

The problem is, I blocked /welcome in robots.txt to prevent duplicate pages on search results (because the / and /welcome pages have basically the same content, one is just more animated), but when I try to fetch as google in webmaster tools, it says it was redirected to the /welcome page (obviously). Is there any way I can tell Google not to listen to the code I have that redirects?

Here is my controller in Laravel, setting the cookie and redirecting or staying on the home page (PHP):

    public function index() 
    {
        $cookie = 'oreos';
        $value = 'redirect'; 
        $expiration = time() + (10 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60);
        $domain = '/';

        if (!isset($_COOKIE[$cookie])) {
            setcookie($cookie, $value, $expiration, $domain);

            $articles = ArticlesModel::latest()->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get(); 

            return redirect()->action('ArticlesController@welcome');
        } 

        $articles = ArticlesModel::latest()->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get();

        return view('pages.index', compact('articles'));
    }

    public function welcome() 
    {
        $articles = ArticlesModel::latest()->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get(); 

        return view('pages.welcome', compact('articles'));
    }

Here is the JavaScript that basically does different stuff based on the page (I'm not sure how important this script is to this question):

    // IGNORE THIS LINE
    if ($(location).attr('pathname') == '/resume') {

        .....

    // if current page is /
    } else if ($(location).attr('pathname') == '/') {

        .....

    // If current page is /welcome
    } else if ($(location).attr('pathname') == '/welcome') {

        .....

    }

If there's no way to tell googlebot to ignore the index and welcome method and just go to index, is there a better way to achieve what I'm doing that won't conflict with googlebot?

Answer 1

Instead of checking the path in your JavaScript, check the existence of the cookie. The redirect is always bad because its bad for performance and apparently for Google too.

You can also move the cookie creation to JavaScript (or even use a different storage for it) and remove any server side logic for it. I think that this point is especially interesting because your feature is actually only affecting the presentation; why should the server care?