RE: FN-FORUM: Google won't index PHP site

date posted 24th January 2006 13:33

On 24 Jan 2006 11:08:15 -0000, "James Firth" said:
> > If you rely on session cookies to display the content then YES it will not
> index
> > your pages properly, the spiders do not understand or support cookies of
> any kind
> > so if you cant view the page without them then it will not see them
> either.
>
> The site does not RELY on cookies, and WILL render without cookie
> support,
> it will just try to plant a new guest session cookie on each visit if the
> visitor's client does not support cookies.

If it automatically puts a session ID in the URL, then the spider will
read the first page (no session ID) but won't follow the links to the
other pages as they have a session ID on them. Spiders don't like
session IDs as they can get trapped spidering the same content over and
over again when the ID changes over time.

You can set your PHP.ini to not put session IDs through the URL, or if
you don't have access to that use this code just before session_start()

ini_set('url_rewriter.tags', '');

And that will stop the session ID being appended to the URLs.

That's worked for me in the past. And I've seen search results with one
and two variables in them, so that shouldn't be a problem once you get
rid of the ID.

HTH

Paul
--
Paul Silver - Web Development and Technical Search Engine Optimisation
07813 654285 -- http://www.paulsilver.co.uk
Check your web pages: http://www.spidertest.com