h jumps out at me is the sessionid as the first variable. While for most sites the sessionid is critical to tracking users, in many cases, a spider will not index such a page. The reason is that they understand that by simply changing the sessionid, the page may or may not change. Because of the dynamic and unique nature of a sessionid, a sAll too often, we come across sites which are powered by a content management system. While a CMS can be an invaluable tool to those who need to manage a large amount of data, many Content Management Systems can cause problems with search engine positioning.

It's not the CMS that causes the problems, necessarily, but how it forms the URL's in the browser which tend to negatively impact positioning.

In most cases, URL's are formed something like:

http://www.somesite.com/default.asp? sessionid=sdf43fase33r&variable=123&productid=4323&pagename =44&template=22

As you can see, this CMS relies on a series of variables to display the page. This is where problems tend to develop.

We are always being asked the effect on search engine rankings when using a CMS of this type. When we say that they tend to perform poorly, the first response is almost always "but I always see pages like this ranking."

While this may be true in some cases, we have noticed that in very competitive keyword markets, static pages always outrank dynamic pages. It is not that the spiders aren't able to crawl the pages, its just that they don't perform as well in the search engines.

But before we get into the rankings, let's take a look at what potential barriers there are to indexing the URL listed above.

The first major roadblock which jumps out at me is the sessionid as the first variable. While for most sites the sessionid is critical to tracking users, in many cases, a spider will not index such a page. The reason is that they understand that by simply changing the sessionid, the page may or may not change. Because of the dynamic and unique nature of a sessionid, a s

URL's in the browser which tend to negatively impact positioning.

In most cases, URL's are formed something like:

http://www.somesite.com/default.asp? sessionid=sdf43fase33r&variable=123&productid=4323&pagename =44&template=22

As you can see, this CMS relies on a series of variables to display the page. This is where problems tend to develop.

We are always being asked the effect on search engine rankings when using a CMS of this type. When we say that they tend to perform poorly, the first response is almost always "but I always see pages like this ranking."

While this may be true in some cases, we have noticed that in very competitive keyword markets, static pages always outrank dynamic pages. It is not that the spiders aren't able to crawl the pages, its just that they don't perform as well in the search engines.

But before we get into the rankings, let's take a look at what potential barriers there are to indexing the URL listed above.

The first major roadblock which jumps out at me is the sessionid as the first variable. While for most sites the sessionid is critical to tracking users, in many cases, a spider will not index such a page. The reason is that they understand that by simply changing the sessionid, the page may or may not change. Because of the dynamic and unique nature of a sessionid, a s

lems tend to develop.

We are always being asked the effect on search engine rankings when using a CMS of this type. When we say that they tend to perform poorly, the first response is almost always "but I always see pages like this ranking."

While this may be true in some cases, we have noticed that in very competitive keyword markets, static pages always outrank dynamic pages. It is not that the spiders aren't able to crawl the pages, its just that they don't perform as well in the search engines.

But before we get into the rankings, let's take a look at what potential barriers there are to indexing the URL listed above.

The first major roadblock which jumps out at me is the sessionid as the first variable. While for most sites the sessionid is critical to tracking users, in many cases, a spider will not index such a page. The reason is that they understand that by simply changing the sessionid, the page may or may not change. Because of the dynamic and unique nature of a sessionid, a s

arkets, static pages always outrank dynamic pages. It is not that the spiders aren't able to crawl the pages, its just that they don't perform as well in the search engines.

But before we get into the rankings, let's take a look at what potential barriers there are to indexing the URL listed above.

The first major roadblock which jumps out at me is the sessionid as the first variable. While for most sites the sessionid is critical to tracking users, in many cases, a spider will not index such a page. The reason is that they understand that by simply changing the sessionid, the page may or may not change. Because of the dynamic and unique nature of a sessionid, a s

h jumps out at me is the sessionid as the first variable. While for most sites the sessionid is critical to tracking users, in many cases, a spider will not index such a page. The reason is that they understand that by simply changing the sessionid, the page may or may not change. Because of the dynamic and unique nature of a sessionid, a single page URL can effectively have many variations, even if the body text doesn't change. The danger of this is that a spider can get caught within the site (also known as a spider trap) whereby they attempt to index a site but keep getting served up pages with different sessionid's.

What happens is, even on a site with a few pages, the spider sees unique URLs because the sessionid changes values. While the value won't change on a single visit, spiders tend to take multiple visits to a site to index the entire site. Therefore, each visit would render a new sessionid, effectively making the page look different to the crawler. A site with a few pages can then have many hundreds of thousands of URL's that a crawler can see. This creates the potential for the spider to get caught in a never ending loop whereby its attempts to fully index a site never happen, and it gets stuck on the site.

This is why crawlers don't like sites with any type of "id" in the URL.

But as you can see, simply moving or removing the sessionid doesn't solve this problem, because there is also a productid. This site risks the spider not visiting it because the spider will see the "id" in the string and may not request the page.

The next problem I see is the number of variables. In general, most crawlers will only effectively index a site that uses 2 or