Session ID in PHP, Bad for SEO

Up until yesterday I was oblivious to the fact that SessionID's were affixing themselves to my cached pages in Google. I had noticed the odd looking url's but assumed it was old indexing before I switched to SEO friendly urls. I was wrong, very wrong and it may cost me more than I know.

Supplemental results abound and the best way to land yourself in them is through duplicate content. Google was indexing my pages and finding the standard /cat/45 url AND they were finding the /cat/45PHPSESSID.....?3424 blah blah. This told google that I had duplicate content and may have already given my directory a bad name.

So what to do? Now that I've found the issue, I need to fix the issue and there are apparently a number of ways to do this. First, I've contacted my host, as the script creator for IndexScript suggested. Next, I did some searching and found that I could probably take care of it through my .htaccess file.

RagePank.com has a great writeup on preventing these Session ID's from becoming a nuisance  and provides a few workarounds. I will be awaiting a response from my host to see if I need to take any further steps and hopefully put my directory back on the right track.

Excerpt from RagePank article:

Session IDs in PHP can cause some real problems when search engines index your pages. For this reason, you should disable PHPSESSID on your sites, and keep session IDs in cookies instead. If you disable PHPSESSID in the URL, this can become a usability issue, as all visitors must have cookies enabled to make use of any code that requires sessions (such as login scripts).

December 15, 2006 · Filed Under Web Development

Comments

4 Responses to “Session ID in PHP, Bad for SEO”

  1. FearBB on December 15th, 2006 10:49 pm

    This is also a very common problem in forum software.

  2. cldnails on December 15th, 2006 10:59 pm

    Sure is FearBB, it’s something that needs to be looked after on almost any php script.

  3. tony greene on December 20th, 2006 7:13 pm

    There has to be something in the PHP to stop this branding of the forum posts that show up in supps.

  4. cldnails on December 20th, 2006 7:21 pm

    Well, I contacted my host and explained the problem. It appears it completely took care of my issue.

Leave a Reply





Other Posts You May Be Interested In


No related posts