PHP Session IDs are killing me, Please help.

Boy, I hope someone can help me with this.

When google goes through my site, it sees two things, it can go through the site and see

www.mysite.com/widgets.php

and it also goes through the site and sees

www.mysite.com/widgets.php?PHPSESSID=fsd9876ewhwf7

From what people are telling me this is a big mistake because it is seeing 2 pages with identical content and is punishing me, where as it is actually just one page.

Obviously, I would like to have the one without the Session Id as that is better for the search engines.

What should I do????

 

It is often a problem with webhost. For my CMS, it was solved by adding the following to the .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
  php_value session.use_only_cookies        1
  php_value session.use_trans_sid           0
</IfModule> 

Code (markup):

Not sure if that's completely cms independant and will work with your cms.

 

I've seen quite a few posts like this lately, some suggesting that it could be something Google has done.

Anyway, another solution I've seen proposed involves something a little like cloaking but which IS NOT cloaking:

In your code, you need to check who is coming to your page (ie an SE bot or a real user), and either set a session ID or not depending on that.

This is a non-trivial intervention into the code, but may be worth it if the problem persists and is causing enough grief.

 

This problem happens to me too. Maybe I should try the code by subseo...