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mwguy1
Joined: Nov 23, 2005
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 11/23/2005 05:58 pm
Hello eveyone,
My colleagues and I operate several websites. Several years ago, one of our sites (in my profile) 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. The same occured on a couple of our other sites.
Now, I cant say we are doing entirely bad as we currently rank #1 for our top search phrase and it is a pretty competitive topic, but it is affecting some of the other rankings I'm sure.
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. Trouble is, I have no clue if this really works, or how to do it.
Anyone faced a similar problem before? How did you fix it?
We are about to do a major redesign and accordingly we would like to make these changes at the same time.
Thanks.
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Hampstead
Joined: Feb 20, 2001
# Posts: 2007
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Posted: 11/24/2005 07:57 am
I'm not an expert in this field but how about adding 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?
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mwguy1
Joined: Nov 23, 2005
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 11/24/2005 09:47 am
From what I have read, telling a search engine not to index a page only means that they will not list it in the SERPS, but they will still spider it, etc. My own logs prove this to be the case. 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.
Timing the sessions out and creating a custom 404 with sitemap.. hmm.. going to give that some thought..
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Hampstead
Joined: Feb 20, 2001
# Posts: 2007
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Posted: 11/24/2005 09:53 am
Another option - make the user go through a login before pages are thrown out with sessiod ids.
The bots won't be able to log-in and therefore they will be dinied access to these pages.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10288
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Posted: 11/24/2005 01:20 pm
If the site does not use any session IDs at all, then 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">
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Hampstead
Joined: Feb 20, 2001
# Posts: 2007
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Posted: 11/25/2005 06:29 am
I knew you'd help out here G1smd.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10288
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Posted: 11/25/2005 07:47 am
You can use the same method to get all the print friendly (URL ends in &pf=1 etc) duplicate pages out of the index too!
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mwguy1
Joined: Nov 23, 2005
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 11/26/2005 12:22 pm
g1smd,
Does this method prevent the search engine from spider the page if the PHP session ID is present altogether, or does it still spider the page but just refrain from indexing it? If it is the latter, would there still be any risk of it being considered duplicate content and therefore penalizing the domain overall even though it does not actually display the PHP session ID pages? This is the reason that it was suggested to me that I should use a 301 permanently moved error instead. I just have no idea how to do that. Thoughts?
Thanks again for your help.
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dirty_shame
Joined: Aug 28, 2005
# Posts: 191
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Posted: 11/28/2005 01:57 pm
I posted a workaround that might help you in another part of these forums here: [link]
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mwguy1
Joined: Nov 23, 2005
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 12/02/2005 10:04 am
thanks dirt_shame
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