Sessions - Do google take it ?

[dbansal]

I have phpbb latest forum installed. It has got sessions.

I want google to go through all my pages but because of sessions, it is not going throught at all. Just few static pages.

How to get them all in its database ?

[Nick W]

Yes, google does accept Sessions. A Session is one of two things in PHP:

A cookie set by the server
If a cookie cannot be set (as in bots) an appended string to every link on the page and subsequently every url

The 2nd one is causing you the problem. The query strings are just too long, and contain a session id which G dont like much ;-)

There's a simple enough fix though, i couldnt find it but there is a modification (http://phpbb.com/phpBB/catdb.php?db=1) or a hack that will make phpBB more SE friendly. If you dont see the mod, try the support fourm (http://phpbb.com/phpBB/). Someone will surely know there.

I hacked it myself last time I built using phpBB but it was many versions ago so my code is probably useless to you.

Good luck!

Nick

[Wail]

Yes, google does accept Sessions. A Session is one of two

No. Google does not accept sessions.
It won't accept cookie based sessions.
It tries not to accept URL based sessions - and looks out for long query strings as a telltale way of spotting them.

Check your log files to confirm this. :)

[dbansal]

THanks guys !

I have one more similar query.

I got a site with long static URLs as::

http://www.WWW.com/productlist.asp?CategoryID=C001&mini=&letter=S


They are present in database. but are not updated after first insertion.

The page is showing grey bar but is present in site: command in google.

Why such pages are showing such anonymous behaviour ?

[Nick W]

>>No. Google does not accept sessions.

To a limited extent, it does. That statement is incorrect. However, u r of course right about the fact that it tries not to ;-)

Nick

[Nick W]

>>long static URLs

That's not a static URL ;-) at the very least it appears to be dynamic. However, that aint the issue.

It's probably just the way the system works. Relatively new url right?

You might want to try WMW's SE Promo forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/) they have lots of these kind of questions and it's probably a better place for someone new to optimization to get started. (a little more newbie orientated)

Good luck!

Nick

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

It seems that there may be some confusion here :)

Spiders generally speaking do not accept or store cookies. As the cookies can't be refetched to the user it just dosen't make sense to do so.

So, for a website to preserve state on spider crawls they have to rely on IP or agent match, or issue URL-based session tracking (but that leads to before mentioned problems). But, even if you did use IP, agent name or even session IDs in URLs to keep state on spiders you would still not be able to recall variables on their later return. At least not if we exclude targeted cloaking, and I expect we do.

And why would you anyway? There is no reason to try and preserve state for spiders. Why use session tracking of their activities anyway? I personally do not se the reasons at all. They are not going to do much shopping, thats for sure :)

[Nick W]

>>shopping

hee hee, agreed!

Just to illustrate the degree of indexing on session id urls: Check this G Search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=allinurl%3APHPSESSID&btnG=Google+Search) Not very many, depite the fact that they remove the variables.

Nick