osCsid & why you SHOULD lose it

[NickW]

There's an archived topic titled osCsid & why you SHOULD lose it does this only now apply to older versions? If so how does the latest version of osC work with respect to sessions and cookies?

 

The topic says: "How do I tell if it is set up correctly? Close all browsers then open a new one visiting the front of your shop. If you hover over the links you will see the osCsid attached to all URLs. Now refresh the page and hover the links, the osCsid should be gone."

 

On older versions is it possible to always remove the session ids, even on the first page load?

[Jack_mcs]

I was, most likely, the person he was referring to when he started that topic and I stand by my statement. You can turn on force cookies if you want to get rid of the session ID's but that is a mistake, in my opinion. Even though he says differently, there are people that won't be able to use your site with that option on. So the real question is, "How many sales would you be willing to lose so you don't have to use session ID's?" The answer should, of course, be zero, though there are others here on the forums that said they wouldn't care if they lost sales for that reason. If that is the case for you, then turn that setting on. Otherwise, yes, you will see the session ID on the first connection. It's a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.

 

If you choose to not use Force Cookies, be sure the prevent spider session setting in admin->Sessions is true and you should update your spiders file if you haven't done that in a while.

[NickW]

The main reason for removing session ids, apart from security, is to stop Google seeing duplicate content and thereby improve the Google ranking. I'll test out Force Cookies to see if it removes the session id even on first page load. Thanks.

[Jack_mcs]

No, it won't cause such a problem. Plus, if you have the shop setup correctly (see the steps I mentioned), the search engines never see the session ID. But if you are really worried about it and don't believe that, you can use the parameter filter in webmaster tools to tell them ignore it.