Don't use &id= ?

[briandunning]

Yesterday when I happened to ACTUALLY BE READING :) G's Technical Guidelines, I came across the following:

Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

Does anyone happen to know if they mean they exclude URLs with the specific parameter "id", or that they are discouraging parameters in general? If they're talking about "id" in particular, hell, I use that all the time.

[SEbasic]

I have yet to see it make a big difference to be honest (With the exception of using keywords in URLs)

[king_cobra]

Yes, they talk of **id** in particular.

SEbasic, u use id as a url parameter and u will see the difference in google. Google spider avoids it completely.

[digitalpoint]

It's outdated if that's what it still says...

inurl:php inurl:id

[Liminal]

I believe they dislike id= in general in an attempt to avoid urls that include with session ids.

[SEbasic]

It works fine for me :)

[RyanBlank]

It's outdated if that's what it still says...
agreed.. i haven't run into any problems with them at least.

Google spider avoids it completely.
i don't think this is true. i see many of these url's indexed in Google

[my3cents]

My site has been using the id url parameter for 5 years and never had a problem in google. However I use ?id= and not &id= since it is my first and only parameter.

[web-spy]

Well, you *can* use the id, and I think your pages will get indexed. But it will take considerably longer.
On the other side, if you have clean URL's, Google will not hesitate and spider all your stuff.

[GuyFromChicago]

Well, you *can* use the id, and I think your pages will get indexed. But it will take considerably longer.
On the other side, if you have clean URL's, Google will not hesitate and spider all your stuff.

Nope. Not true.

Just had a similiar discussion here (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=35458).

[Jim_Westergren]

It's wrong or a typo.

Should read IMO:

Don't use "&id=" with session ID as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

This is posted by GoogleGuy on WMW (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29720.htm):
I've been aching for a long time to mention somewhere official that sites shouldn't use "&id=" as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use "&id=" with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter, but we've only mentioned that here and on a few other places.

Note that he says "session IDs".

[briandunning]

Shawn - when you search Google for inurl:?id you get 220 million results. When you search Google for inurl:&id you get zero results.

Either this is just me not using inurl properly, or &id= definitely needs to be avoided. :)

[digitalpoint]

?, & (and most other punctuation) are not normal searchable characters. Which is why your inurl:?id query produces identical results to inurl:id.

[dave487]

I would try and steer clear of using page.php3?id=54 and go for
page.php3?keyword=54 if possible.

[GuyFromChicago]

I would try and steer clear of using page.php3?id=54 and go for
page.php3?keyword=54 if possible.

No reason to do that. In addition to this thread we discussed url formatting here (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=35458) as well.

[zhisede]

Search with "&id=", I get the following results,

Results 1 - 10 of about 647,000 for &id=. (0.23 seconds)

consider the number of websites using such urls and the searching results. I think they do ignore such urls, although not completely.

[briandunning]

The difference is that you searched for PAGES that have &id= in the content; the inurl:&id= search finds URLs that include it, which is zero.

:)