PHP PHPSESSID in url cause probelms in spiders?

[BaseBallNFLDude]

Ive searched and read almost all posts regarding the phpsessid in url. But I cant understand 3 things:

Does it cause problem in search engine spiders? or do they ignore it?

I have installed pretty urls mod, did this bring up the phpsessid? Would you recommend to use the default SMF 2.0+ friendly urls instead?

The 3rd question depends on the first two.

Thanks

[Kindred]

I recommend that you don't use any of the silly URL changing mods. They do nothing at all for seo.

And the session Id should not matter to spiders.

[BaseBallNFLDude]

I think that they would help especially in posts. They would get rich content in the url with keywords of the topic title.

I saw on another post you had commented another member suggested a robots.txt method to block ssid from site crawling but I think its not a good choice, havent done any experiments with this though so not sure. You opinion?

[Kindred]

Urls have little to no effect of seo... Regardless of what you THINK, adding words in your URL may help humans identify what the content is, but search engines do not count it for or against you. Content on the page is what matters to them.

Also... Think about it. Posts on a forum are written by users... Not by trained writers. How many post titles are actually going to have useful "keywords" in them and how many are just going to be "help me" or something equally useless?

As for your comment on robots, I am uncertain what you are referring to....

[BaseBallNFLDude]

Actually you should know, it really does help. Its not what I "THINK", its a fact. I have tested it on my websites and other customers you can look it up on SEO books/etc.. Even directory names help. ex:    domain.com/rich/rich-post-powered [nofollow] 

Anyway, for others that will read this post, google has a solution for this called google parameters. If you want to tip off google to not count any ?phpsesid or ?search etc... Google it for more info.

Also dont try using robotx.txt to disallow /?PHPSESSID it will delete all ur crawled pages.

[Kindred]

BaseBallNFLDude,

I do corporate websites and the associated search engine stuff for a living.
you are incorrect.
URLs *USED* to make a difference, 5+ years ago - perhaps even as recently as 3 years ago... but not now.

Search engines spider CONTENT at this point. Properly tagged content is all that really matters


the "SEF URLs" in SMF are left over and serve no useful purpose at all... they basically just change the url from index.php?blahblahblah into something that looks like an HTML call....   
I will warn you that pretty URLs will likely cause potential issues with mods and other stuff (including performance)


As for your comment on Robots.... I do not believe that I have ever suggested anyone use robots.txt to prvent session ids.

[BaseBallNFLDude]

So you are saying its better to leave them as they are by default?
What kind of spike should I expect using "sef urls" on the server resources +20% more usage? I will be adding cache cdn service to boost the performance.

Thanks for your tips so far.

[Kindred]

well, the standard smf "sef" urls are pointless.... they are left over from the old days when search engines did not do well with dynamic urls.

PrettyURLs or other "prettifying" mods tend to store associations in the database, which means that every page hit adds more db calls...

[BaseBallNFLDude]

Would the use of a CDN help when using the pretty urls mod? Since it would cache the content as is and lowering the db calls?