Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I know some people use this technique to track visits and site navigation, etc. but I personally use variables like?expertid=2 or?answerid=20, for VALID static content!
Are these now considered "unappealing" by Googlebot now? I have plenty of excellent content on pages whose URLs contain such GET variables, and I've noticed that for several months now Google has not been crawling those pages. I find this very disheartening. It can't be too difficult for Google to discern pages that use databases to store information from pages that have massive session id tracking variables in them.
Should I be changing all of these pages that I have to static pages now?
sr123
The "id" as a variable name in the Query String is not something Google should force on us and frankly it’s very different to what a session id looks like. It’s too late for many sites to go back including me because changing this would badly screw up all my natural back links.
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.
[google.com...]
Sites don’t really use "&id=" they use "?ID=" so as long as its the first variable in the Query String you should be ok?
allinurl:ID=
shows tons of sites where they do have ID= in the index.
My site has ID= in the article links and we never had a problem getting all pages in the index.
But, nonetheless, I'm in the process of converting everything to static URLs and all the existing backlinks will be redirected to the new static links.
I hope this is isn't a wasted effort. I don't think they'd tell me not have ID= unless they really felt it was a disadvantage to appearing in SERPS, right?
As for parameters like QuestionID=, it seems HIGHLY unlikely that they would misconstrue that to be a session variable. An entry level programmer could do that code. I don't think you need to worry about it.
A couple of years ago I discovered the 'id=' Google problem in my URLs. Not one of those pages showed up in the SERPS for Google. I changed all the 'id=' to 'theid=' and the problem went away.
I don't know whether it's changed now (I use mod_rewrite these days so the problem is no longer an issue) but certainly in my experience it's only 'id=' that's a problem, not any variants of it, like 'expertid'.
So this is OK and natural way of linking:
page.asp?ID=1234&p=2
or
page.asp?ID=1234
---
But this will NOT get indexed according to the guidelines and is fair enough becuase its not very natural and is one small step to become closer to what a session id looks like:
page.asp?p=3&ID=1234
or
page.asp?x=3&ID=1234&p=2
---
Just for the record this what a session id looks like:
page.php?article=1&SESSIONID=00f44496d8c40283f4b0d9c07fbba0e6
Notice the number of characters and the type of characters in a session ID. Its often has to be tagged on to the end of a URL being the last variable. It’s very deferent to a page ID but Google has shown us where to draw the line.
