?id= problems with?pid=

will this be a problem?

[nquinn]

Hi all,

I've read quite a few posts about the variable
'id' causing problems with google crawling dynamic pages

( file.php?id=blah ).

My site is currently using 'pid' as the variable.
(showitem.php?pid=123456)
Has anyone had experience with variations of 'id' causing problems?

My links haven't been indexed yet, but the problem was at first caused by having &PHPSESSID stuck in there (yuck).

Before the next update, I'd like to know if this needs to be fixed to save myself some time.

Thanks,

Neil

[NickCoons]

About two years ago, I had an issue with Google crawling one of my sites because I used a variation of "id" on each URL to track the user moving through the site (which, of course, in hindsight was not the best way to do it).

The problem here is that there are virtually an unlimited number of URLs pointing to the same page (because any variation of "id" points to the same page, it doesn't alter the content), and Google would never go beyond my home page.

I've since removed those, though I still use IDs for other functions. For instance, much of the site's content is database driven, and there is a single PHP script to retrieve each type of data followed by an ID parameter. Google seems to have no problem with this because it is a one-to-one relationship. That is, ID=x always points to article x, and only ID=x points to article x.

[jatar_k]

[webmasterworld.com...]

from the horse's mouth in msg 4

The main question to ask are whether it requires session ids, or has a url parameter "id=" that looks like it might be a session id. Those are stoppers for most spiders.

pid is close and could be construed as a session id

[nquinn]

I'll let you guys know what happens.

I'm using a similar shopping cart on 2 sites.

I left one site alone, still using?pid=etc
On the other site, I used mod_rewrite to remap

mydomain.com/pid/123456
to
mydomain.com/showitem.php?pid=123456

sooo.... we'll find out for sure soon enough :)

Thanks,

Neil