Search Engines and Session ID's

[baggers]

I have had an issue on my online store of a customer following a link from a search engine, which was complete with a session id. The customer has registered on the site ready to purchase a product. Customer #2 (totally independent) has come along, obviously through the same search engine and session id, and customer #2 then has all customer #1's details up on the screen.

 

Now, when I first installed osc, I looked up on all this and made sure, from the start, that 'Prevent Spider Sessions' in the admin was changed to 'True', but obviously some search engine's are caching the session id, which is now causing a problem.

 

Is there any easy option short of installing the search engine friendly urls, which i believe (please correct me if i'm wrong), don't have a session id with them, and with this setting the session id only gets allocated with certain 'session id needed' pages, such as shopping_cart.php . Now if I was to install this contribution, where would that lave my existing links from search engines, is there a way of automatically directing someone who has followed a link on a search engine like this http://www.mystore.com/product_info.php?products_id=365 to the new link created with the search engine friendly urls?

 

Thanks very much for any help!

 

Paul

[flood6]

This contribution should help your site identify more of the bots and prevent them from getting sids. Easy to install.

 

I haven't tried the stock or contributed SE safe URL packages, I haven't needed them, so I can't really answer the second part of your question, but updating the your spiders.txt should almost knock out the problem.

[baggers]

Thanks for the spider contribution, I have added that to the site.

 

Paul

[boxtel]

Thanks for the spider contribution, I have added that to the site.

 

Paul

There is also a contribution which tells spiders who come back with a session id on the url which they previously indexed to go to the same page without it. (permanent redirect if you will)

 

That would result in the situation that those spiders would drop those links with session id's in future updated indexes and replace them with clean ones.

[baggers]

Found that contrib,

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...l/search,spider

 

However, the file to upload is an .htacess file and if i upload that to my server, when i type in my web address it comes up with a script error, and then the error dissapears if i remove the .htaccess file from the server!

 

Obviously I have missed something simple somewhere, anyone know what it might be?

 

Thanks,

Paul