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unique URL for evey visitor

IP in the address - all pages PR0

         

jpavery

1:44 pm on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



My site dominates for competive KWs (2 words i.e. "red widgets", "blue widgets", "yellow widgets".) Home page has a PR7.

a long story leads us to sticking the IP and a unique number into the URL for evey visitor. In essence each of our pages will have a unique address for evey visitor we get - even google. Consequence is all pages other than the home page have PR0...

I'm not overly worried since we are currently King of the SERP for our nieche and it has been that way since August.

If anyone wants to see the site and make suggestions on what we could do if we ever decide to worry about the PR for the internal pages please sticky me and I will reply.
JP

lazerzubb

2:08 pm on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I am guessing you use Sessions IDS in the querystring for this, due to this being probaby the most common spider trap, google is very careful with this type of url's.

I would really suggest that you remove it, or just create a hidden session instead, this way each time Googlebot visits it will get a unique session, but since it's stored on the Server it will not matter, and all the URL will be the same for all users, i have used this and it has worked fine so far.

jpavery

3:09 pm on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



ummm... ok - good point I could do that... but right now it ain't broke so I'm wondering if I should fix it... I will leave as is.
JP

lazerzubb

3:11 pm on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I still wouldn't leave it, just because it isn't brock doesn't mean it can't get better, it's like comparison to what people have said about Server Admins the last weekend, they don't do any upgrades because it works at the time.

When you have session id's in the url you will get much fewer inbound links to specific pages within your site which might have proven very valuable.

atadams

3:27 pm on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Until a year ago, I had session variables in the URLs for one of our sites. After I took them out of the URLs, our pages listed on Google went from ~80 to ~1400 and traffic increased about 800%. If you can avoid putting this type of info in the URL I would. It's not going to hurt your rankings, it can only help.

crumpeta

3:45 pm on Jan 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I used mod_rewrite to keep the session id out
of the url only for spiders. All other users get session ids
or cookies.

peterp

9:58 pm on Jan 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



JP,
It's a tough decision to make. While changing your session tracking method may help your google ranking for internal pages it might also hurt your sales (if you get a few customers who have ancient browsers). There are some browsers that are still being used that do not offer support for Cookies or Session variables (which are also a form of cookies).

If you are selling products mainly business-to-business, I would suggest leaving your link structure the way it is. If your main method of selling is business-to-consumer, then I would deffinately recommend you change your method of session tracking to a more search engine friendly method. It's been my experience that consumers shopping at home tend to have upgraded browsers more often than businesses do.

This is, of course, only a suggestion. I would deffinately not consider myself a search engine expert, nor a session tracking expert (although I have used both methods in the past).

peterp

10:00 pm on Jan 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



crumpeta,
Rewriting url's is probably the best method I know of tracking sessions. I've been using IISRewrite from Qwerksoft for quite some time and it's amazing. It lets me use Regular Expressions to rewrite urls, which makes it practically limitless.