Google and Session IDs

Lorven · 05-31-2005, 09:59 AM

I have heard a lot about Google not returning pages with Session IDs in
their SERPs. My company's site currently does assign Session IDs due to the shopping cart software we use, and I am trying to get our web guy to update the software to a newer version that doesn't issue Session IDs, at least not search engines at the very least. I was wondering if anyone could point me to any proof (or even strong evidence) that Google really punishes people for having Session IDs. My webmaster doesn't believe me and won't devote the necessary resources to fixing this problem right away, but if I can get some strong evidence that this is why we don't rank at all in Google, even though we do decently well in Yahoo and MSN, this would allow me to get the necessary update pushed up. So if anyone could help me find any sites, documents, etc, that back up that Session IDs are evil, it would be much appreciated! Thanks.

gorillaboy · 05-31-2005, 11:55 AM

Why do you need proof? Tell your "web guy" to do it or he's fired.

Geeze!

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Quote:

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session ID's or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

Johan007 · 06-01-2005, 08:26 AM

Be careful – sometimes these programs do give an alternative version to SE. Simply do a site: command to see if the pages are indexed. If not check your back links. If you have back links check the “source” of the links for the a href tag. PM me the site if you want me to take a look...but I think I have spoken to you before about this :S

imaginemn · 06-01-2005, 08:48 AM

The session ID's are not really the problem. Type the following in Google.

site:upgradememory.com

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,310 from upgradememory.com

The problem you are running into is that you don't have any content. Only a shopping cart. What I would suggest you do is build a small "Marketing" site that links to the shopping cart. Even if it's a 10 page marketing site to attract your customers. A shopping cart alone will not bring back good results in SERPS because the products tend to compete with each other for keyword relevancy.

imaginemn

jg_v7n · 06-01-2005, 09:10 AM

What more proof do you need than: "we don't rank at all in Google"??

Lorven · 06-02-2005, 11:34 AM

Thanks for the tips...

Imagine, I'm not sure what you mean by us not having any content. If you look in the left nav menu of our site, you'll see things like FAQs, Buying Guides, Articles, etc, that are all purely content. I tried to counteract all of the products on the site by having about 40 or so pages of pure content. It's not much in comparison to the number of products we have, but most of our competitors that rank better than us in Google have even less content than we do. Would these pages not "count" as content to SE's for some reason?

gorillaboy · 06-02-2005, 11:49 AM

Those URL's are terrible!

jg_v7n · 06-02-2005, 12:56 PM

Not just session "Id's" don't use "&id=" for anything at all...

Johan007 · 06-03-2005, 02:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by imaginemn

The session ID's are not really the problem.

You havent seen his site m8. Looks like real session id's maybe hard coded into the HTML.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jg_v7n

Not just session "Id's" don't use "&id=" for anything at all...

"&id=" are fine. There is a big deference between page id with query string and a session id. I know about the latest news article claiming Googleguy does not like the use of "&id=" but he was really misquoted from something he wrote years ago.