Session IDs and crawlers

[fablau]

Hello here.

When we setup our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com to allow session IDs to be assigned to users back in 2001, we decided to not assign them if a bot called the page. We wanted to be sure that bots, which officially can't store cookies, wouldn't have found links containing every time different session IDs . Just to better clarify, the way session IDs are generated on our system, is the standard way: if users have cookies enabled, a cookie called PHPSESSID is created which stores the session cookie. If the cookies are not enabled, session IDs are added automatically by the system to any link URL included on the page which could potentially cause the bots to find every time different link URLs with the session ID appended to them.

Now, after 12 years, we are considering if this is still a valuable solution, or can it be detrimental or negative in some way? What are your thoughts about this issue?

Thank you in advance for any thoughts.

Fab.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Fabrizo,

Nowadays I would say there are better solutions to fix this issue. But I'm really not sure if you could convince me for rebuilding this feature on the site as the impact for SEO would probably be not really big. I think the best way to not set any Session IDs in the URL at all so you have plain URLs. What you then could do is use these pages as the basis of your URL structure and SEO strategy. You could also then canonicalize the session ID'ed urls back to the plain ones.

Hope this helps! Makes sense?

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I can't speak to the technical side of setting up session IDs, however, you can deal with the URL issue with canonical tags and setting up URL parameters in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.  That should prevent the search engines from indexing every URL with a different session id and keep all the page authority on the main URL.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[fablau]

Thank you guys for your replies and insights, I am more for keeping what we have lived with so far, which means leaving the system on our site disabling session IDs when bots request the pages, unless you tell me there is any downsides to do that... that's really what I am trying to find out here. Is there any downside to not serve pages with session IDs to search engines compared to users?

Thank you again.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

You're not giving the search engines different content, so it's not deceptive.  I can't think of any way it would harm you.

[fablau]

Thank you Kurt, that's exactly what I thought but I wanted to have confirmation from the experts community.

Thank you again!