$_SESSION['value']; and SEO Advice

Hi All,

I use sessions to control access to certain pages of a site and have been wondering if bots will respect that function when they crawl the site.

What I want to happen is that the (resticted access) page URL gets the same SEO treatment as any other page on the site - dispite the $_session restrictions to users.

I've checked the page/s in crawl simulators and all seems well so can I presume the bots will do the same?

TIA

The SE bots will see the pages exactly as users see them. If there's retrcited content, then the bot's won't be able to see this.

The only possible exception to that is if a bot picks up the session ID of a current session. Shouldn't happen, but is possible in some vague reality. I'm hoping that you are using cookies and not a ?sid=4klfgkjkh4wre3 in the URL to track session? if not, you should make sure that you do. It's the best way to do it from the SE's point of view, and if users have a problem, they can enable cookies for your site. Most modern browsers let you do that for certain sites, so you should be fine.

Hi,

I don't show the session values in the URLs so it looks like I'll be OK from that possible snag.

Thanks for your advice Catacaustic, I appreciate your time.

ATB