Comments on: Are PHP Session ID’s A Cause For Duplicate Content With Google?

By: acnecaregal

acnecaregal — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:20:19 +0000

i’m also running a test on one of my sites to test this idea of yours. let’s see how the google finds it.

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Session ID’s and Google: Part 2 — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:43:32 +0000

[…] July 20th, 2007 I wrote a couple weeks ago Are PHP Session ID’s A Cause for Duplicate Content with Google? […]

By: Bill Hartzer

Bill Hartzer — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:35:12 +0000

Wouldn’t there be a way in in the robots.txt file to make sure that they don’t index certain parts of the site?

I know there’s a lot of issues with Microsoft’s ecommerce server, though, as every internal link and every session has a different URL.

By: shandyking

shandyking — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 02:39:44 +0000

Josh, I am running a test on one of my sites to see how Big G handles them.

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By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 01:22:54 +0000

in general, what is the feeling on how Google handles urls with session IDs appended, php or otherwise?

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 22:19:01 +0000

shandy: The right solution is to hold the session IDs in a cookie, rather than the URL.

A session ID can be stored in the URL, or in a cookie. In the URL, it (used to) cause a mess in the SERPS. In a cookie, it doesn’t matter.

But you still need a session ID for any type of interactivity; it’s just where you put it that matters.

These days, I highly doubt that a session ID will cause major dupe issues in Google - after all, they are a bunch of bright people over there, and I think that would have been a problem they tackled early on, in order to improve the quality of the search results.

By: shandyking

shandyking — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:39:25 +0000

Hey Dave!

I totally get that sessions can tracked with cookies instead of the url and that cookies and sessions are not the same thing.

“Disabling the session IDs completely isn’t the right solution.”

What do you think is the right solution?

By: david

david — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:06:36 +0000

You’re a victim of misinformation and some confusion Adam. Session IDs are not an either-or with cookies. The session ID contains no information, only the reference to a session. That way you can store lots more information server-side. Problem is..you have to pass that ID around with the user so you can keep track of them. There are 2 ways to do that:

1) Pass in the URL (like you’re talking about)
2) Store it in a cookie on the user.

All you have to do is convert your site to storing the ID in a cookie instead of the URL and your problem is solved. Disabling the session IDs completely isn’t the right solution.