SEO Urls

[bkpie]

I realize you have to reset your cache after you change things on seo urls but I noticed that on the page if you mouse over pictures or links it shows the rewritten link and if you click it also shows the correct link but if you use a spider simultor like one at seobench is shows the whole ?osid#########

So are the search engines still picking up the session id?

[michael_s]

Session ID's are not part of SEO urls. If your session settings are not correct in the admin panel, the session ID will show in the urls.

You need to use the force cookies method to make sure no session ids are in the urls, regardless of using the seo urls mod or not. This is a common misconception.

You can also configure php at the server or .htaccess level to hide session ids.

[bkpie]

Thank you Michael I do not have forced cookies on since I had problems with a previous site and at least IE 6.0 did not have cookies enabled and I lost a bunch of potential customers. That always gets me.

I guess I was under the impression that prevent spider sessions set to true would have corrected that but guess I was wrong.

Is there some documentation you know of to do it at the .htaccess level?

[michael_s]

Just google it. It is a popular subject. If I have more time I will see if I can find it.

Prevent spider sessions only prevents from listed spiders. If they are not in spiders.txt, it will serve the session id unless force cookies is enabled.

I have never had a problem with force cookies being enabled. If someone is using a browser with cookies off or no support for cookies, they are living in 1998 and should expect problems. But that is another story. Of course, you have to cater to your customer base.

[bkpie]

Here is an article that covers that section and may help others understand as well. It cleared some things up for me.

osCommerce Knowledge Base