Will Google Follow a Dynamic Link?

[CoreUnderneath]

will google follow a link like this

http://www.mysite.co.uk/content_static/candidates.asp?session_id={7BA819A0-5EE1-4A67-AD59-18EFE486FF1E}&PageStyle=candidate

Thanks,

Darren

[CoreUnderneath]

anyone?

[MHes]

Hi
You need good pr for the spider to go past a "?" in the url string.... pr6+ maybe.

It then has to cope with the id bit and I guess it will not bother.

[tedster]

At the Boston SES, Daniel Dulitz of Google specifically mentioned session id as the kind of dynamic link that Googlebot will try to avoid.

That makes plenty of sense - spidering session ID's will usually generate lots of duplicate content and can end up putting the spider into an "infinite" space.

[sampyxis]

Hi all,
Newby here - great discussion

I have two sites (ecomm) where almost all the pages (except the about us, etc.) are dynamic - like this sitelink.com/Products/ProductDetail.asp?PROD_ID=140

Does this mean, the content for each product description won't be spidered?

Another newby question - what is pr(x)

Thanks

[netguy]

according to google, there shouldn't be a problem. Follow the link to what they say they spider:

[google.com...]
(at bottom of page)

[sampyxis]

Great -
Thanks NetGuy - also did some more lurking in this great forum and found great info.

Thanks again

[daroz]

One other thing for Google to consider. A few months ago a security white paper was distributed (Google for it if interested) that discussed, in part, security implications of SessionIDs.

Part of the problem what that, on some sites, SessionIDs could be re-used, or possibly hijacked and used by a malicious user. (I.E. Session Reply attack or establishing a session outside of an SSL session and later using that same SessionID to access 'secure' information...)

One of the recommended solutions was to reject 'user-supplied' sessions. If the session passed from user to server is not in an 'active' list, to either ignore it and generate a new one, or throw an error.

Depending on what the site may do it may not be generally wise for the GoogleBot to crawl sites with SessionIDs if it cannot knowingly strip them out when presenting the SERP.

[biggles]

This comment from GoogleGuy about avoiding session IDs in another thread [webmasterworld.com...]

The other main point is that the CMS shouldn't require session-ids. Google is actually pretty great at dynamic urls and getting better, but session ids cause a problem because they expire. Make sure to check for that, too.