Does Googlebot Read Session IDs?

[Kingof5]

I did a raw export from AHREFs yesterday and one of our sites has 18,000 backlinks coming from the same site. But they're all the same link, just with a different session ID. The structure of the URL is:

[website].com/resources.php?UserID=10031529

And we have 18,000 of these with a different ID.

Does Google read each of these as a unique backlink or does it realize there's just one link and the session ID is throwing it off? I read different opinions when researching this so I'm hoping the Moz community can give some concrete answers.

[Raydon]

Yes!

You have to inform yourself and really watch out for this kind of stuff and SE bots.

[MikeRoberts]

Safest bet, set up canonicals that point to the page minus the parameter so even if Google does read the session IDs it will understand that they relate to the canon link. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure if Google reads those sessions IDs or not either and have seen conflicting information. I know they read other parameters as separate URLs... I had a few issues with the way one of our sites handled products (sometimes it was ?model= and sometimes it was ?prod_id= and some old products also had ?sku=). But adding the canonicals will solve this problem if it exists and if the problem doesn't exist it won't hurt having a self-referential canonical sitting in the code in case someone scrapes your site.