6 replies to this topic

[texasmarketer]

Have a question that I hope you guys can help me with. We are in the process of redesigning a long-time client's site. We would really like to use cookieless sessions on it, but have read conflicting reports about weather that would be search engine friendly. Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated.

[linux_lover]

That would be a no, if the sessionID is appended onto the end of the url that is.

The basket would not be spiderable, but then why would you want it to be? So long as your products pages dont use sessions and you just use them for your store basket, you should be fine.

[texasmarketer]

We’re thinking of using ASP.NET cookieless sessions. Unfortunately, there is no way to turn them off on particular pages, and the Session ID is embedded in the URL. For example…

www.somewhere.com/(dal5s355ma5eij453prnhjr0)/product.aspx?id=223

I have the sneaky suspicion that search engines won’t like this (since the session ID would be different each time the spider came back). That is unless search engines have technology built in to allow for session IDs like that and ignore them.

Edited by Jill, 28 July 2005 - 12:40 PM.

[Randy]

Your sneaking suspicion is 100% correct in my experience texasmarketer.

One of two things usually happens. Either the engines recognize that the url contains an SID and refuse to index the page, which means it never gets indexed unless you offer them a clean version; or they don't realize an SID is involved and you end up with thousands or hundreds of thousands duplicate pages indexed.

Neither is a good thing.

[henri]

Also, have you considered how your Web metrics system will be affected by the ever-changing URLs? At least the log-based systems may feel confused...

W3c says it the best.
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/uri-choose

Cheers!

//Henri

[Dave]

You might be able to get round it with a decent site map and a load of no-follow attributes - but only if you don't rely heavily on internal linking.

I'm not an expert though so I'd wait for one of the big guns to confirm what I say before taking any action on it...

[mla]

Have a question that I hope you guys can help me with.  We are in the process of redesigning a long-time client's site.  We would really like to use cookieless sessions on it, but have read conflicting reports about weather that would be search engine friendly.  Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated.

Why do you want cookieless sessions? This is a perfect application of them.

mla