[ic] Removing cgi-bin/cat and ?id=<session_id>

[Gert van der Spoel]

> This is my first post to the interchange-user's group, having not
> received a response I was wondering if it got published to the mail
> group.
> 

http://www.icdevgroup.org/pipermail/interchange-users/2010-February/

It's there ... And looks like someone hi-jacked the thread hehe...

> 
> I've been told removing the cgi-bin/cat component of URL's and the
> session ?Id=<session_id> string helps improve search engine listings.
<snip>
> Wouldn't we want the first rendering of the index.html page to render
> URL's without the id string?  Isn't that one of the more important
> pages
> for the search engine?

I'm not sure / can't think at the moment how it can be accomplished to not
show the session id on the first page, but it is possible as sites such as
http://www.backcountry.com, https://www.highdefinition.ch/  and
http://www.hydropool.com/ (to name a couple from the list of interchange
sites on icdevgroup.org) also have it like that ...

Regarding search engines: if they are good boys/girls their bots are caught
by RobotIP, RobotHost or RobotUA and this will set mv_tmp_session which in
effect will not add id and mv_pc to the links, so the search engines should
not see these anyway.

> If so, I have started and not yet finished modifying Server.pm, and
> Session.pm to make the assumption that the end user has cookies
> enabled,
> and writing some JavaScript to test if the browser has cookies enable,
> and if not post this information automatically to tell interchange that
> oops no cookies for this user/session better append id? and then render
> index.html with id= suffixed.
> 
> It just feels like somebody else has solved this and I'm going about
> this the hard way, and perhaps not in a way that will actually work?
> 
> The apprentice asks his master for guidance.
> 
> Ron
>