Does Prevent Spider Sessions Work?

[jond]

Im switching over to an oscommerce based site. I currently have good rankings in the search engines and dont want to mess this up. I wanted to know if setting 'Prevent Spider Sessions' to True works well for keeping the spiders from getting locked in your site? I also wanted to make sure that this did not prevent them from being able to index the site, but only prevents starting sessions. Thanks in advance!

[boxtel]

Im switching over to an oscommerce based site. I currently have good rankings in the search engines and dont want to mess this up. I wanted to know if setting 'Prevent Spider Sessions' to True works well for keeping the spiders from getting locked in your site? I also wanted to make sure that this did not prevent them from being able to index the site, but only prevents starting sessions. Thanks in advance!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

do not know what you mean with "locked".

it does prevent session allocation for those listed in the spider.txt file.

it does not prevent indexing of your pages.

[♥Vger]

keeping the spiders from getting locked in your site

 

You are referring to the 'Google Dance' I believe, where googlebot comes to your site and goes round and round in ever decreasing circles adding item after item to your shopping cart. So, setting 'Prevent Spider Sessions' to true stops the spiders listed from generating session ids - and so they can't add items to the cart, and they don't get 'locked' in the Google Dance.

 

Also advisable with Google, as its the only spider that recognises this command, to put the 'noindex,nofollow' meta tag in the head section of all pages you don't want google spidering at all (with or without sessions), such as shopping_cart.php.

 

Vger