id= as a URL query string

My experience...don't use it.

[atadams]

In reading lazerzubb excellent Deepbot and Freshbot FAQ [webmasterworld.com], I noticed he suggested against using "id=" as a URL query string - the thought being that Google might not crawl URLs with this query string because it is frequently used for session IDs.

I hadn't noticed this before in my ongoing research and I've have had a problem getting some pages on a PR7 site of mine indexed and it happens they have "id=" in the URLs (not for session IDs). So I changed the "id=" to a different string yesterday morning and last night Freshbot crawled these pages (about 100) that Google had never crawled before.

So it seems to be another fairly hard rule: don't use "id=" in a URL query string

It's only a fairly hard rule because I've seen some pages in Google's index with "id=" in their URL, what the difference is between their pages and mine are I have no idea. But it's too easy to use a different query parameter name in your code to risk not getting indexed.

I know I've said it before, but I really can't understand why Google doesn't come out and tell us directly about issues like this.

[ciml]

Thanks for sharing this atadams. I wonder if the URLs with id= have higher PageRank?

[atadams]

I'll have to do some research on that. Does anyone know the best way to search Google for URLs with "id=" in them?

[WebGuerrilla]

It's only a fairly hard rule because I've seen some pages in Google's index with "id=" in their URL

I think if it is a rule, it is fairly new, which would explain why you can find so many urls in the db that look like yours. In the past, G has always had a tough time with session ID's.

Developing rules to identify the most obvious occurences is certainly a smart thing to do.

[jjdesigns4u]

OK so if youare not using ID= then you have a chance, right?

What about a URL like

mysite.com/_shopByBrand.aspx?brand=Body20Tone

this is a dynamic brand page can google follow a drop down link to this page

I thought google is not looking at anything after the?

are all of my dynamic pages being ingnored or not?

[Susanne]

Very interesting observation atadams. I've had the same problem but haven't changed URLs yet. You might find this thread interesting:
[webmasterworld.com...]
And in rmjvol's post you'll see how to search for URLs with "id" in them.

[bateman_ap]

Same here, I have had this hunch for a while, about to change all of mine

[lazerzubb]

I've done quite a lot of research when it comes to the "ID=" part, and have found always the same result, as soon as i change it they get spidered (I've only tested it on pages which have a PageRank of 4-6)

But yes there is sites which get's indexed with url's which contains "ID=".
They have mostly had a very high PageRank (I can't remember the last time i saw a page which was indexed with ID= that had a PageRank of less than 8, even though there probably is loads of pages with less)

p.s how do you know i am a "he"? ;)

[WebWalla]

allinurl: php?id=

The above turns up many pages with both id and ID as parameters.

[lazerzubb]

Yep a lot of them have direct inbound links, and a lot of them is rewritten with mod_rewrite.

The thing though is that if you combined a few forums (There is some forums which have enourmous amount of posting, and they all contain "lol" )which used id= for thread presentation you have the number of pages indexed (it's much more less than 1.2 million, and i can assure you that there is a huge amount of pages which doesn't get indexed due to ID=

All i am saying why use it if you can use something else which saves you time?

[bateman_ap]

Well I changed my id= into something else and they have all been picked up in this update

[vmaster]

Well, one of our dynamic sites does have cart_id= in the URL, and that seems to be fine.

[daamsie]

I have several pages listed in google (and performing well too), with ID=001, etc.. in the query string. The pr of those pages is 6, so perhaps that helps. After reading this I may change that though, because I wouldn't want to have them lost in future updates!