Google and "&id=" in the URL

Does this need changing

[breham]

Hi,

I've read in the Google sitemaps area (now webmaster) that googlebot does not like '&id=' in the url

Does anyone have any experience as to whether '?id=' is any better or do I need to get rid of id= altogether?

If so how do I go about it without losing all of the pages I have had spidered by Google already?

Many thanks
Brett

[tedster]

Google historically has usually chosen not to index urls with "&id" in the query string because it is often an indicator of a user id and can lead googlebot into a potentially infinite information space where URI after URI points to the exact same content. However, in more recent days, they do seem to be testing their mettle against this type of URI a bit.

So, if you have some of these URIs indexed in Google, and you are not resolving many different ids to the same content, then I would not suggest trying to remove anything from Google. You may well create a problem that doesn't currently exist.

And yes, "?id" is quite common and as long as each id value resolves to a unique bit of page content, there should be no pitfall in using "?".