Posts: 5,938
Name: Adam for web page design, not program
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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The theory was, way back in the day, that search engines didn't like pages containing any variant of an id= parameter since they were primarily used for affiliate marketing (id=whatever implied an affiliate) and because a number of people tried to game the engine by "creating" the same page millions of times over and merely altering the id= querystring. This is going back a LONG time, however.
As of fairly recently (8 months ago), Matt Cutts from Google mentioned that id= as a parameter isn't a very good idea since big G treats it as a session hash.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-...eview-session/
Scroll down to the bottom to see the comment.
This is probably the basis of the article comment and something that has been bent way out of proportion. There probably is a small kernel of truth to it, but not enough for users not to create querystrings if necessary, and if things such as custom 404s and URL rewriting (I think that's what it's called in PHP...don't hold me to it, though, since I don't work in PHP) aren't readily available.
Personally, I don't use any common variant of id= or s= or sid= or any other querystring that could be interpreted as a session hash and I don't have problems that way. So if you need to use querystrings, then try to come up with some other unique identifier. |
