stop indexing PHP SESSION IDs

danielle · #1 03-26-2006, 06:19 AM

hi folks
please help
Several years ago, one of my company's sites was re-designed and the programmer used PHP Session Id's extensively.
This caused some immediate problems as it appears that when Yahoo and some other search engines visit the site they are seeing the different session ID's as duplicate content pages and accordingly are not ranking them well. It sure is affecting some of our rankings.
We have removed all of the session ID code that we could find, but Yahoo and other search engines are still following their old links in the their databases when they crawl the site.
I have heard that a script can be added to the HTACCESS file to check to see if the Session ID is in the URL, and if it is, do a permanent 301 redirect to the same page, but without the Session ID. The thing is, I have no clue if this really works, or how to do it.

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ricky · #2 03-26-2006, 06:24 AM

Hey,
try this out add the robots no index tag to the code when serving up the session ID page.
OR
make the sessions time out and create a custom 404 page with a sitemap on it. -- This message may have been cut off and the rest will only be shown to members. To become a member, click here --

clarke · #3 03-26-2006, 06:28 AM

I think telling telling a search engine not to index a page means that they will not list it in the SERPS but they will still spider it etc. I worry that since it is still being spider, it might still consider it duplicate content even though it would stop it from showing the actual results to the public in the SERPS.
sessions time out idea is also worth tying.

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ricky · #4 03-26-2006, 06:31 AM

I have got an idea!!
make the user go through a login before pages are thrown out with session ids.
Well, what's the benefit- it will not let the bots log in and therefore they will be dinied access to these pages.

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ray · #5 03-26-2006, 06:34 AM

The easiest way is for the script to self-test the URL of the page that is being served, as it is being served, and to add this tag in the <head> section if there is a session ID included in the URL: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> but this is useful only when your site doesn't use any sessions IDs .

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