2 replies to this topic

[matthew harris]

Session tokens in the URL

I currently have a client with a fairly large e-commerce site. The site was written in Cold Fusion and uses session tokens in the URLs. The main issue I have with this is that people wanting to link into the site are copying and pasting the session ID into their inbound links creating multiple sessions and all kinds of wacky stuff with the shopping cart. So, I’m trying to get the client to have his programmers change the system so that the session tokens are not in the URL (maybe by using a cookie).

My questions to the group are:

Are there other SEO reasons to avoid have sessions tokens in the URL?
Has anyone encountered problems with this before and found a good solution?

Thanks in advance,

All the best.

[Jill]

Yes, it's extremely important not to have session ids being delivered to the search engines or they end up with hundreds if not thousands of the same page indexed under multiple URLs.

You'll want to either find a new system that doesn't involve session ids or be sure to feed the search engines only the clean URLs.

Moving this to the dynamically generated content forum as there's more info there on this topic as well.

[matthew harris]

Thanks Jill!