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Session Identifier

Session Identifiers are used by various websites to track the user behavior, his/her browsing patterns, and to roughly estimate the time an average netizen spends referring to each page of a website. The webmaster of the respective websites uses such information for optimizing the web pages and to organize the ads, which are crucial for success on the World Wide Web, especially if the website represents some online business. But such session identification is not looked upon in a friendly way by most of the search engine spiders. The issue here is not about interfering with the users freedom or his/her privacy, but it is the difficulty associated with correctly finding a website and indexing the page for the search engines. In order to better understand the scenario, please read ahead.

Session Identifiers are unique ids given to each visitor when he/she visits a website. Usually, the session id (&session_id=) is added to the URL of the respective pages the user may be browsing. But, from a search engine perspective, every unique URL is a separate existence and hence it considers all such cases as separate pages, the similarities in the URL other than the unique session id not withstanding. In other words, search engine spiders look upon the same page with different Session Identifiers as different pages and not as the same one. It is true that modern search engines have enough intelligence for consolidating mirrors and similar page contents, but, still, on a practical scale, as it has been experienced, in many cases, the page indexing is not being done correctly, which, at the end of the day, would be detrimental for a website, given the search engine optimization efforts the web designers might have put in while making the website. It is like having to witness all of one's efforts going down the drain for the sake of a single design consideration, which unfortunately is not search engine friendly.

This is a sort of a ‘catch 22’ situation for most webmasters, for having to do away with Session Identifiers will dent their chances of tracking and researching user patterns, but including the same will definitely spoil all sort of search engine optimization efforts that had been put in while designing the website. But one is left with no other choice, but to take either of the sides, for both of these designs won’t go hand in hand!

Therefore, it is advisable that those who wish to have a better page ranking and are investing a lot of time and money in search engine optimization efforts, try to do away with Session Identifiers. On the other hand, if yours is an online business for which session tracking is indispensable, go for it, but at the expense of page ranking and other search engine goodies. This is a classic example in which the adage 'to win something, one may have to lose certain other things.'

In this scenario, an intelligent enough webmaster might consider using cookies instead of Session Identifiers to balance user tracking and search engine optimization in one stroke. But, unfortunately again, search engine spiders won’t accept cookies for a variety of reasons, and if the website design is such that one may have to live with cookies to navigate other pages, search engines simply will not do it and at the end of the day, the page rankings will suffer. Hence, for page ranking sake, it is better to stay away from cookies as well.

Tail piece: Search engine optimization or SEO is a technique of designing or tailor making a website to suit the search algorithm used by the popular search engines.

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