Google Crushes Session IDs In Battle To The Death
You often hear best practices saying that Google won’t index your pages if they force Googlebot to take a sessionId. Is that really true?
How does Googlebot treat session IDs?
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22sessionID%3D%22
Found while looking for folks using Blue Martini, which seems to output some nasty long URLs featuring BM user IDs and “J sessionIDs”: http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22bmuid%3D%22
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Google will index session ids no problem. Google won’t accept cookies, so some sites automatically parse the session ID into the url instead.
Google will index that, then when it comes back again it will be given another session id, hence index the same page under different urls each visit.
Basically meaning big dup content problem.
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Comment by PPCblogger — July 1, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
8 million results of session id results! take a look – though where all this horrid, duplicated stuff actually ranks is anyones guess.
Not handling session id’s properly, as a webmaster is just plain lazy!
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Comment by richard baxter — July 2, 2008 @ 8:36 am
what’s really interesting is when i signed out of google, the results went up to 31 million!
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Comment by richard baxter — July 2, 2008 @ 8:37 am
PPC Blogger – excellent point. Will add a dofollow link to you later.
Rich, that’s an astronomial amount. Crazy how much crap is published, huh?
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Comment by Gabriel Goldenberg — July 2, 2008 @ 5:52 pm
Indeed it is, indeed it is!
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Comment by Richard Baxter — July 3, 2008 @ 2:43 pm
What’s the best way to deal with this? By creating cookies instead? How can I create friendly URL’s if a site already uses session id’s?
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Comment by Caffeine Blog — November 24, 2008 @ 5:58 pm