indexing and sessionid's

[mellonhead]

Say I have a url:

www.domain.co.uk/domain/12345&sessionid=764764329643294329762457654

Where the sessionid is a randomly generated number to prevent cacheing.

Will this sessionid affect my indexing?
Will it appear in the index, or will google discard it as irrelevant?

Thx to all in advance, as usual!

[Susanne]

I have been involved in a site where Google cached a page several times, each time with a unique session ID. This is obviously duplicate content and I wrote to Google a couple of times pointing this out and asking whether we should use traditional cookies instead of session IDs but got no reply. We decided to abolish the session IDs as we didn't want to risk being banned by Google because of having double identical pages. The site is new and very dependent on high ranking in search engines so we really don't want to gamble with stuff we're not sure about.

[martin]

Remove the session ids if you want to stay in Google at all.

If it sees hundreds of identical pages it will ban you.

[nell]

We use this in a single php page that sends customer orders to us to prevent caching. The site has some 600+ pages ranked (1st page results) in Google so it causes no problems.

<?
$delete = time() + 1;
header ("Expires: $delete");
header ("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header ("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); // HTTP/1.1
header ("Pragma: no-cache"); // HTTP/1.0
?>