7 replies to this topic

[Toopac]

Can anyone tell me how to remove session id's from an Invision power board like the one here? i want the solution to be as simple as possible, im working on a full mod rewrite at the moment & it's going good but i think i'll stop with these bloody sid's

[OldWelshGuy]

I though IPB was already one of the better SEO frinedly sites.!

[Toopac]

Yea it's not too bad i get indexed by all major bot's but i have read that Google won't index too well url's with query's in them, thats why i am doing the full mod rewrite & i noticed that after the rewrite is done the new ".html" pages work but once a spider index's the page as a guest the spider gets the "s=551o551o8o88o8o88" etc in the url, but that url is no longer valid lol

I suppose i just want to make my forum, hrmm, like a very attractive lady in bed but the ripped stockings are ruining it

[torka]

But AFAIK we're not rewriting the URLs here and Google indexes the pages from this board just fine. Actually, my experience has been that Google is one of the better SEs in terms of indexing dynamic pages. (Yahoo, on the other hand... )

In fact, there have been a couple of occasions where people have come here to ask for help on ranking for a specific phrase, and the thread they started on this board has ended up ranking more highly for that phrase than the actual page they're trying to work on... :doh:

If your board has lots of good content and gets a good number of inbound links, it should do fine without a mod_rewrite of the URLs. So if the only reason you're doing that is because you think the board won't get indexed without it, you can save yourself the trouble.

Of course, if you've got other reasons (i.e. other technical considerations or you just don't like the way the URLs look), then you can ignore what I just said.

--Torka

[OldWelshGuy]

Toopac, what mods (if any) have you put in place then to create the sess id's?

< added mods as in hacks etc not moderators>

[Toopac]

I installed a few hacks/mods like ibstore etc but the session id's come with IPB out of the box...

I do get good indexing but im just wondering, what if the forum had html pages & no querys & session id's, would i do better?

I suppose this might aswell be a poll now & i'll judge after if it's worth it...

[linux_lover]

From some vague back area of my memory I remember that its the setting in php.ini in the session section that specified whether or not id's are shown on url or stored via server tmp cookie type file.

You might wanna check ur server settings - I think its:

; Whether to use cookies.
session.use_cookies = 1

but dont quote me on that - ask Randy

AFAIK if users browser/or server says cookies==false then url sessionids=true.

[Randy]

LiLo !

I was staying out of this discussion because I'm not familiar enough with IPB to know if the code starts a session as a default or not. I assumed that might be the case since lots of boards do that to track users.

Toopac, I'm sure Scottie can answer this question since she (and Alan I think?) configured this board, but they're both either still in Chicago at the SES conference or on the way back home. She'll be able to tell you for sure what was done here.

It may have been as simple as allowing Guests to read the threads. I don't know though.

To test LiLo's idea, you might want to upload a php page to the same domain/server, but not part of the forum itself. Then pull up that page in something like Delorie's Header Viewer or plug the page address into WebBug to see if there is any mention of the server sending a Session ID.

If it does, it's probably not IPB. It's the server. And if that's the case there are ways to change it, either in your server's php.ini file or via .htaccess so that only your domain is affected.