What about this Sessionid thing???

<a href="http://mysite.com/?sessionid=" class="topnav" target="_blank">

I am somewhat new to the SEO game and I'm having a little problem determining if this session id in a link like the one above would pose a problem for any bots.

You see, it doesn't appear as though any session is actually started until a user is logged in. Am I correct to conclude that this is "spider-friendly" since the sessionid does not have a value given to it? Or does this still introduce a problematic situation?

When the link is clicked, the URL looks like the following:

http://mysite.com/cgi-bin/mysite.cfg/php/enduser/entry.php?sessionid=


Anyone care to explain the logistics behind this????

Thanks,
B.

PHP doesn't quite work that way.

As soon as a remote host requests a apge it is given a session ID, so that is actually there as soon as someone loads any PHP page at all. As far as I've seen, you don't need to manually add in the session ID as you're doing there because the PHP engine will either store it on the users computer as a cookie or will add the session ID as a query string ot the URL that gets requested anyway.

The problems that come with using this (or other dynamic pages) is when ther are big values after the page names. It's widely viewed that 2 small-ish values are usually spidered and cached alright, but anything with larger values or more values will cause problems for the spiders.

By the look of what you've got there, I'm assuming that the session ID is to track a user that's logged in. For any search engine there's two things that you have ot keep in mind.

1. If the user has to log in to see some protected content, then the spiders won't ever see that anyway no matter what you do.

2. If the user logs in only for identification, then spiders will search the site anyway regardless of any session ID's.

3. if search engines record the sesion ID as aprt of the URL's that they are spidering, they can have problems when they come back to try and spider these again.

Session ID's and other tracking values like that in URL's are really not good to use unless they are really required. I know there's bene some times that I've had to use them myself. The best thing you can do is try to get rid of the variables that you're using there someow and live without them.

Thanks Catacaustic, but I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying here.

Is it that the session IS or Isn't being started when you're NOT logged in? There's no extension in the URL after the "=" sign if you're not logged in......

And I'm pretty sure that the spiders don't log in

Please explain points 2) and 3)?

Thanks,
B.