SESSID and PHPSESSID no longer a barrier to indexing?
- By: John Andrews [privmsg - website] On 2nd Mar 2006 In
The count of pages in Google's index with SESSID and PHPSESSID in the URL has been steadily increasing. The percentage of those that appear in the primary results also appears to be steadily increasing.
245,000,000 pages with PHPSESSID in URL
4,170,000 pages with SESSID in URL
Is this still an important optimization factor, and are these only cookie-less page URLs? Has Google started to manage the PR distribution around SESSIDs, or do they still result in asymptotic decay of passed PR? Has the dup penalty decided to skip the SESSID? I know it's still best to limit the information to meaningful bits, but if the bots can manage SESSIDs properly, a whole slew of new competition is joining the SERPs.
- Y! MyWeb
Don't fear the great unwashed yet
I don't consider the ability to crawl URLs with sessionIDs for the supplemental index "managing session IDs properly" ;)
All those URLs have a PR value assigned, so they dilute PR distribution, coz Google still doesn't consolidate multiple URLs per page on Joe Webmasters's site.
Also, IMO it's the Webmaster's job to provide Googlebot with clean URIs, so why should Google care?
My limited observation is
My limited observation is that the session indexed URLs are supplemental index fodder, while normally non-session URLs are not.
So it's more a longtail issue than short.
2c.
more and more outside supplemental index
Yes, Brian that is my historical observation as well but more and more over the past month I am seeing a fraction of an indexed site's SESSID pages in the SERPs (not supplemental). After 3 or 4 visual checks (different sites, different weeks, different topics, no scientific basis) it seems to me to be increasing.
I make up a quick search where I expect non-competitive affiliate stores and I find pages with SESSIDs showing up outside of supplemental. That didn't used to be the case (?)
garden hose valve
tire cover
Never was a problem I knew of
But it'll screw up AdSense big time
I'll continue to...
...go through the hassle of having minor code hacks done to provide clean urls for the spiders to chew on. Besides the spider issue, I don't like looking at messy urls and I'm sure my traffic might appreciate this aethetic point of view as well.