Tip for vBulletin owners.

[Jesse_Smith]

Quick, get rid of the session ID part of the URL and you might get a lot of listings in the next update. That's the 's=###########' part. I got rid of it last night and so far the bot has got 169 of the posts/threads/boards. Right now it only lists 23 URLs, but it looks like it will change on about the 25th, when it dances! Those 23 URLs only show 's=&', with out the long session number.

[GoogleGuy]

Yah man, session ID's suck. Anytime you can drop those it usually helps. :)

[shrirch]

Places where you can get rid of them easily include

-- forumdisplay template
-- forumhome template
-- frontpage

If you're using phpportals, sessionhash needs to be eliminated from the front page of the site also.

Keep in mind that google only crawls one level deep I think and the first variable it picks up is the sessionhash.

[Jesse_Smith]

These are the ones that I edited.

forumdisplay_forumbit_level1_nopost
forumdisplay_forumbit_level1_post
forumdisplay_forumbit_level2_nopost
forumdisplay_forumbit_level2_post
forumdisplay_multipagenav_pagenumber
forumhome_forumbit_level1_nopost
forumhome_forumbit_level1_post
forumhome_forumbit_level2_nopost
forumhome_forumbit_level2_post

It's not going only one level on my boards.

Index > Board > Threads!

[shrirch]

One level of variables. Vb put the sessionhash as the first variable.

[Brett_Tabke]

session ID's suck

That's one for the quote book.

[Good_Vibes]

Could someone fill me in...
What is a session ID?
Is it on the html page or on the server, and how do I get rid of it (why was it there in the first place?)?

[Jesse_Smith]

If the URL doesn't include a random number, then you don't have to worry about it.

[jons5150]

We used a simple .htaccess re-write that modifies the actual output of the url's to ".html" MSN was first to pick us up and now has thousands of our Vb posts in their directory. Google has been visiting every other day for the past week, following a site map created just for Vb.

[ruserious]

If you edit out the session-id, you are completely getting rid of users who do not /cannot use cookies. ;)

@GoogleGuy:
There was some discussion here: [webmasterworld.com...] wether google would not just skip urls with sessionIDs but instead just drop the part of the url which looks like a sessionID, if the PR of the homepage is high enough. I didn't want to believe, but on the other hand it would be a possible way. So any info on that?