SEO for Dynamic Websites

E-commerce and the session ID curse...

A dynamic website is the fastest way to offer good, relevant and exciting content to your customers, but Google finds a dynamic site hard to index - what should you do?

Who's your audience?

You should create your website for your user first and Google second. Sometimes these two separate audiences relate and react positively to the same thing, but your focus should always be on the human user with Google a close second - and not the other way round. At the end of the day whilst Google might give you the exposure, it's never going to buy anything from you, ever. Talk to your potential client on every occasion, whilst keeping the search engine happy.

Bring the noise

The problem most e-commerce websites have with Google is the sheer vast amount of catalogue or products carried. We faced the same problem with our toy store - with a modest 150 products, by the time we'd included size options, colour preferences, personalisation, gift messages, various forms of shipping and what wrapping the customer would like we had an enormous database of product, or at least it was enormous as far as the search engines were concerned. On top of that, we wanted to recognise users as they visited the site so that we could capitalise on their next visit - that's why we employed the session ID. That's probably why you've employed it too.

The only problem is that Google doesn't really like the session ID because as far as it's concerned it means a new page that needs to be indexed, even though it has been there before. In fact, the very nature of session IDs is that the same product or page Google has been to before could have infinite session IDs - and that's why it doesn't like them one bit.

Why the rage?

As far as Google is concerned, or any other search engine, for that matter, the session ID offers content (which may have already been indexed) at a new location. Every time the Googlebot visits, that same content could appear under a different guise/session ID and therefore, rather than wasting resources and maybe doubleindexing the same information, Google chooses to ignore it. The Googlebot would rather just bypass the whole potential mess and turn its back on a page when it spots an '&' in the address.


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