remove sid for site navigation

why does google have our sid if we hide from spiders?

[chamco]

Our site uses an sid to track users and the items they put in their cart. We have a db of spider ip addresses and don't display the sid for them. We tested by adding our ip to this db and trying to browse the site, and we didn't get any sids.

On googlesitemaps, I see that google sees tons of urls with sids. Our shopping cart is restricted using robot.txt, and google lists the urls that they didn't see because of the robot file. I see they have LOTS of links to the shopping cart with different sids.

Do they see my site with sid or without?

My frontpage has a pr of 5, but the rest of the site has pr of 0, which we haven't been able to change.

Is it worthwhile to change over to cookies? I'm wary of cookies because users can disable them...

[theBear]

>>>>
Our site uses an sid to track users and the items they put in their cart. We have a db of spider ip addresses and don't display the sid for them. We tested by adding our ip to this db and trying to browse the site, and we didn't get any sids.
<<<<

Just because you no longer display a sid to certain ip addy doesn't mean that prior visits from that ip didn't already get a url with a sid on it.

>>>>
On googlesitemaps, I see that google sees tons of urls with sids. Our shopping cart is restricted using robot.txt, and google lists the urls that they didn't see because of the robot file. I see they have LOTS of links to the shopping cart with different sids.

Do they see my site with sid or without?
<<<<

Well that depends on what happens when Google visits that url on your site. If Google still gets the page when it uses the url with the sid in it then it sees that url (page) with a sid in it.

>>>>
My frontpage has a pr of 5, but the rest of the site has pr of 0, which we haven't been able to change.
<<<<

Haven't a clue about this, not enough information to hazard a guess on.

>>>>
Is it worthwhile to change over to cookies? I'm wary of cookies because users can disable them...
<<<<

Yes users can turn off cookies, they can even delete specific cookies. Just how this would cause you problems is difficult to forsee. You can always check for cookies when they go to add to the cart and inform the visitor if they have cookies disabled they won't be able to use the cart (shop). So really it should be a non issue.

[edited by: theBear at 1:26 pm (utc) on Sep. 15, 2006]