11 replies to this topic

[qwerty]

I'm looking over an OS Com site and noticing that a lot of the pages aren't indexed, I assume because of session IDs in the URLs. But I just randomly checked to see if Google has a particular page cached, and it came up, but without the session ID.

That is, if I'm on www.domain.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=22_34&osCsid=0aba09e9de901cad0a3a38f40c53af36 and use my toolbar to request the cached copy, I get

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.domain.co...php?cPath=22_34 as retrieved on Aug 6, 2005 20:40:53 GMT.

Am I missing something? If I change my user-agent to Google, I still get session IDs on a number of pages.

[RyanBlank]

I work on a bunch of OS Com sites.. The session id's have never really been a problem for any of them as far as indexing is concerned. It seems they (SE's) just chop off the SID's in most cases from the sites indexed listings.

[qwerty]

I see. So that "friendly URLs" mod is really just for cosmetic changes?

[RyanBlank]

I see. So that "friendly URLs" mod is really just for cosmetic changes?

Well, not really, no. That mod takes the variables out of the urls and replaces them with /, but does not remove SID's.

[Randy]

It's been awhile since I've worked with an OSC site Bob. They're appending an SID before you ever go to add something to your shopping cart now? Back in the day OSC didn't do that.

[qwerty]

It would seem so, but the page is getting indexed. However, a site search on this domain did bring up quite a few supplemental results.

[RyanBlank]

They're appending an SID before you ever go to add something to your shopping cart now?

From what i can see they do not add a session id until after the checkout button is clicked when in the shopping cart.

[qwerty]

They do on this site. I never added anything to the cart, and I got the SID in the URL as soon as I clicked onto a product page.

[RyanBlank]

I just went through a few sites here and 1 of them behaves how you just mentioned.. very strange, but you're right. as soon as i go to a product then navigate elsewhere, a session id is attached. But only on 1 of the 5 sites i checked out. i wonder why

[projectphp]

It seems they (SE's) just chop off the SID's in most cases from the sites indexed listings.

WOW!!! Really? That is HUGE. When you say "Search Engines", do you mean just Google, or Yahoo, MSN and Ask as well?

Also, remember that many OSCommerce sites have, bare minuimum, a few hacks installed. There is a no session ID hack, a couple actually, and an SE sid free hack as well.

It may be worth starting with a review of what is installed, in terms of hacks first, and go from there.

[DaveBeck]

hi qwerty

Since the guys at osCommerce released milestone 2 you have been able to control sessions for the search engines directly through the admin panel. To do this you just need to set the "prevent spider sessions" value to true and the session will be disabled for spiders as they enter the site.

Sessions will be appended to links depending on how the link is setup. OsCommerce has a number of functions that will allow you to do more than just set up a link to another page. You can specify whether the page will be under SSL, has a variable or even a session.

CODE

<a href="<?php echo tep_href_link(FILENAME_LOGOFF, '', 'SSL'); ?>" class="headerNavigation"><?php echo HEADER_TITLE_LOGOFF; ?></a>

you can see that this link is going to be directed to the log off file and it should be using SSL.

As for the search engine friendly URL, to be honest I don't think there is much benefit and have seen a few bugs occur when using the built-in version. A good linking structure should see all of your product pages indexed. The best thing that you could do be to look into a number of the header tag controllers.

Dave

[qwerty]

It seems they (SE's) just chop off the SID's in most cases from the sites indexed listings.

WOW!!! Really? That is HUGE. When you say "Search Engines", do you mean just Google, or Yahoo, MSN and Ask as well?

Not all, at least on this site. Yahoo has only the home page indexed, MSN seems to have a number of pages indexed with the SID and since Ask doesn't seem to have a site: operator, I ran a search on inurl:domain.com and got 2 results, no session IDs.

This site is just a prospect -- a referral from one of my clients -- and I guess I'm going to have to discuss this with them before I complete my proposal. As Michael recommended, I need to find out what mods they're already running before I have much chance of figuring out what they need.