Session Id's and Os commerce

[Doc Voodoo]

Hello I have been getting allot of mixed messages about the session Id's for os commerce. Some people say it's not a problem and other are telling me it is :?: I have not been able to find any new info on the subject most of the forum posts out there are 2-3 years old. If it is a problem how do I fix it. My PHP programmer for Os commerce does not think it to be a problem but he said if I find a way to fix it with out making a bigger problem go for it .

My web site is CPAP-shack.com

[briehan]

Hi Doc

In the admin section of OSCommerce go to Configuration > Sessions and turn on the setting that says 'Force Cookie Use'. This will force people to enable cookies in their browser, but the session id should now be removed from all the URL's

[imported_christof]

Hello Doc

Yes like with all session IDs on websites, its not good for SE's and is deffinately a problem.

The solution from Briehan will fix your problem.

[Blazingpie]

Hello I have been getting allot of mixed messages about the session Id's for os commerce. Some people say it's not a problem and other are telling me it is :?: I have not been able to find any new info on the subject most of the forum posts out there are 2-3 years old. If it is a problem how do I fix it. My PHP programmer for Os commerce does not think it to be a problem but he said if I find a way to fix it with out making a bigger problem go for it .

My web site is CPAP-shack.com

yeah, follow briehan's suggestion. With a session id that gets added to the querystring, itll prevent proper spidering and at worse can slam you with duplicate content penalties.

Basically, what happens is that each time the spider enters the site, its session id gets added to the url, but as this was different from the last time it sees it as a new url. However, as the session id isnt needed to view the content, and links from other sites will often link to the page without using the id (or using a different one, if they copied the link directly), google (for example) may end up going to the same page twice, but with 2 different urls. And then u may get slapped with a duplicate content penalty (esp if this happens with a lot of pages)

[Doc Voodoo]

ok thanks alot I set that up . Now by forceing them to enable cookies I wonder what thats going to do if they don't ?

[Paz]

Hi Doc,

Well everyone else has had their say so I'm going to have my two cents... haha

Yeah, there wil be a very small minority of visitors who refuse to accept cookies, but I think 95% + people don't know what a cookie is and use the browser default.

Even if some people wil refuse the cookies, the benefits are that your rankings will improve in time and you will get more traffic on the whole.

I've checked with this tool and it looks good:
http://www.seochat.com/?go=1&option=com_seotools&tool=13&display=both&submit=Show+Links&url=http://www.cpap-shack.com/cpap-humidifiers-c-74.html

It'll take a few weeks for things to settle down. Let us know how you get on!

Cheers,
Paz.