I am facing the problem of PHPSESSID getting appended to all the links in my site. I found out from an old thread in DP that it can be removed by adding php_flag session.use_trans_sid off Code (markup): in .htaccess. Can someone please tell me whether this has any negative implication as far as search engines are concerned?
This is from Google's webmaster guidelines: If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page. So the sooner you get rid of them, the better.
Which has negative implication? The code? or the session? Well, the session id will hurt, but if the code gets rid of it, then you're good to go