Longterm effect of removing session ID from URL

good? or bad?

[boudicca]

I have been running a fairly successful e-commerce site for about two years, but this is the first time I've really looked into SEO (I'm a programmer, not a business-minded person). I noticed that the Googlebot is choking on indexing the product pages, due to what looks like the sesson ID being too long. Also, I noticed that we have the same page indexed in Google multiple times with different sesson IDs. So, this morning I took a crash course in Google optimization by reading this forum, and added a little code to the site that doesn't set a session id if the user agent is Google.

So, two questions: I noticed that the "freshbot" is still crawling the pages with sessions currently indexed. Will those ever go away? Also, will I have to wait until the next deep crawl to see if my product pages will be properly indexed now, or will the fresh crawl notice the difference?

Lots of questions, but thanks for your help.

[rcjordan]

Hey, welcome to WebmasterWorld, boudicca.

From googleguy (works for google, hangs out here) in recent thread about a CMS product:

Yeah, session IDs cause a real problem for every search engine spider. A search engine needs a link that won't be expired in a few weeks, and most sessions expire much faster than that.
The other thing is that with session IDs, it's too easy to crawl duplicate content with different urls. So anytime you can avoid session IDs, I would recommend it.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[amoore]

Google will eventually "forget" about all those URLs with session IDs in them. I'm pretty sure that when the deep crawler comes back next month that it will still hit a lot of them, but it will start to learn from your current links. At least, that's my understanding from experience. It should index it much better from what it learns then. That will be late march, probably, when it builds the index based on that information.

[boudicca]

rcjordan: Thanks for the welcome, and the link.

amoore: That was both exactly what I wanted to know, and the answers I wanted to hear as well. Much appreciated.