JSESSIONID and GoogleBot -- is this important

Google caches the page under a particular session ID

[brycen]

Some of my pages, when indexed by google, show a JSESSIONID in the Google Search results, e.g.:

http://www.example.com/wn_bay_bridge_closure.do;jsessionid=678844C407B6E28C546AF36CF21BC336

My first question: is this harmful? My second question is: how can I get rid of this? I assume that my web framework (struts, unfortuantely) is returning a 'jsessionid' because GoogleBot is not accepting cookies.

Should this be chalked up as a google bug (something google should filter out)? Or should I be doing something different here?

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes, it is very important. If you are generating sessionids and those ids are being picked up by Google - it can lead to indexing pages over and over again as google bot picks up the new session id.

To fix - get rid of the session ids...

[bcc1234]

Disable url rewriting in your application server.

[Alex70]

help needed! How do you redirect index.php to mysite.com/, you must be fed up on this but I can not find the answer anywhere.
Anyway for people that think this is not important:

www.mysite.com has a chace date like 26Aug
www.mysite.com/index.php has a chace date like 21Aug

big PROBLEM....

[LunaC]

This works on my server, be sure to test headers after, you want to see a 301 redirect:

# Redirect index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.php$ http://www.example.com.com/%1 [R=301,L]4

[g1smd]

See also the thread at: [webmasterworld.com...]

[ashear]

LunaC, that's a pretty complicated way to do a 301.

I would just use

Redirect 301 /index.php [mysite.com...]

Less overhead on apache. But if you do not get much traffic then it's no big deal.

[ashear]

bcc1234, session id's are not created based on URL re-writing. A tracking system of some sort would create such a session.

Depending on the software that you are using that creates these sessions, you need to make adjustments to the code base.

Some packages require such tokens to be passed. Is this a standardized software package?

[g1smd]

That "more complicated" version of the redirect also handles any index pages in folders and subfolders, not just the one at the root.

[ashear]

But if you only want to redirect one file, why would you use the more complicated version?

[g1smd]

The simple version only redirects the index file in the root, not any index files in folders and sub-folders. So, if you have index files in folders and sub-folders, you need the more complex version.

[ashear]

Interesting...

So why would you want to take all of your index pages from all sub folders, which I would assume has unique content and combine it into one page?

[g1smd]

The complex version redirects:

- www.domain.com/index.php to www.domain.com/
- www.domain.com/foo/index.php to www.domain.com/foo/
- www.domain.com/example/index.php to www.domain.com/example/

etc. I cannot see why you would not want to do this.

[MatthewHSE]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.php$ http://www.example.com.com/%1 [R=301,L]4

Why does the .com appear twice (.com.com), and what's the '4' at the very end of the rule for?

[g1smd]

Looks like a bunch of typos.

Check the examples in [webmasterworld.com...] instead.