Regarding session ids

[site-report]

Hi there,

Google does not like session ids or anything in a query string that could be a session id. As you quite rightly point out, forums and ecommerce sites do use session ids and therefore the way to get pages listed is to detect the user agent for a spider (e.g. googlebot) and not turn sessions on when they visit.

In PHP, this code may look something like:

<?php
if ( (strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Googlebot')) ||
||(strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'slurp@inktomi.com;')))
{
// a spider, therefore don't start sessions
}
else
{
// start the session
session_start();
}
?>

This is a legitimate technique used by many forums and search engine friendly ecommerce solutions.

Kind Regards,
James
Kind Regards,
James

[Christian_SEO]

Great tip! Thank you!!!

[site-report]

Posted new topic rather than Post Reply though! Should have been in 'Can Bots Find PHP' thread.