osCsid removal for Search Engine Robots (Spiders)

Please click here and read the "osCommerce Session ID Nightmare" in order to prevent serious privacy violations and other dilemmas.

Sessions preserve the state of variables when users navigate from page to page on your osCommerce website. A unique Session ID is created and assigned to every unique visitor. Search Engines Spiders and Session IDs, however, don’t get along very well and Session IDs can become a true pain for any osCommerce store owner.

When visitors navigate from page to page within your store, a unique Session ID is directly appended to the URL. A URL that once looked like this: product_info.php?products_id=21  will look similar to this (with the session ID appended): product_info.php?products_id=21&osCsid=ac8d82362234596455ecb8dd9115f91d5f8a

Search Engine Robots (spiders) are not smart enough to strip this Session ID from URLs which they pick up. Search Engine Robots tend to assume that a unique URL leads to a unique page. These spiders are anxious to collect every unique URL they can possibly find.

Some of you might conclude that this is a good thing, since you would be receiving more incoming links to your osCommerce store. However, these unique links – including the Session ID - return the same exact pages as your conventional links.  Now you are facing a duplicate content problem as well. And you probably know how search engines feel about duplicate content.

In order to stop Search Engine Spiders from indexing URLs with Session IDs and in order to remove the pages with Session IDs that already have been indexed, we have included a 2nd contribution in SEO Pack I: osCsid removal for Search Engine Spiders.

Whenever a visitor arrives at your site, this contribution will check if it's a Search Engine Spider and if so, strip the Session ID from the URL before even presenting it to the Search Engine Spider.