Google now indexing the "&id=" parameter

[tedster]

There's a change in the technical guidelines from Google. Here's the news from Vanessa Fox

... we've modified our webmaster guidelines. Previously, these stated:
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these
pages in our index. However, we've recently removed that technical guideline,
and now index URLs that contain that parameter.

Google Webmaster Central blog [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

[jonrichd]

I'm not sure if this is really new, or Google finally updating its guidelines to reflect reality. I have a site that uses a page.php?id=123 type structure, and I noticed over a year ago that the URLS were getting indexed, even though they had not been previously.

Of course, a 3 or 4 digit number is unlikely to be a session ID, so maybe they let that one in early.

[g1smd]

Of real importance, will be the time that they can recognise a session ID and remove it from the URL that they show in the SERPs.

Until then people need to design their sites to not show any session IDs to bots. And even after that, avoid doing that anyway.

[CainIV]

Indexing that is almost worse either way. It just makes the chances of dupe content that much better...

[OutdoorMan]

and I noticed over a year ago that the URLS were getting indexed, even though they had not been previously.

It's probably because somebody has posted a direct link somewhere on the web. I've heard of that before, also with search strings/URLs containing the &id= parameter.