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.