Cookies from the #1 page in Google serps

before even goin there

[Nikke]

I'm not quite sure how to explain this phenomenon, but today th site that holds the first position for a sertain search phrase tried to send me a cookie via Googles result page!

I'm not using any pre-fetch software, but have set my browsers to ask about cookies.

How can a site try to set a PHPSESSID cookie from just being listed in Google's SERPS?

[seppyr]

Are you sure that you are don't using any mozilla browser?
The mozilla browsers are prefetching a page if a link contains the rel="prefetch" attribute by default.
Google uses this attribute on some searches, see
[google.com ]
for more info and how to disable it.

[Nikke]

That's it! Thanks!

I am using Camino and Firefox, and both are Mozilla based.

I really thought I was going nuts or that someone had invented a really good way to keep track of their position and click ratio from Google.

[g1smd]

There is an option in the Mozilla and Firefox preferences to turn it off. It is somewhere under "Advanced" if I remember rightly.

[You caught me on a public terminal, away from home, and it uses IE.]

[Nikke]

Now, it could be rather interesting to actually make use of this feature somehow.

Since the request is identified as X-moz: prefetch, one could count it as a Google SERPS listing, decide what to actually give the prefetching browser, opt out of displaying certain ads on such a page...

Google has a pretty detailed description of how to prevent pages from being prefetched, but I wonder, will it actually work?

from [google.com...]

To block or ignore prefetch requests (from Google and other web sites), you should configure your web server to return a 404 HTTP response code for requests that contain the "X-moz: prefetch" header.

Wouldn't that actually serve up a 404 page to the user who has prefetched the page and then click on the link?