[phplib] PHPLib and searchengines.. From: Maurice Jumelet (maurice <email protected>)
Date: 07/14/00

Hi all,

Does anyone have any experience with PHPlib and search engines?
If I for example look at altavista.com and search for NOXX

the third(!) link says:
http://www.noxx.com/index.php3?Noxx_Sess=05438c08077abe7ad881f22946c6a0ce

As you can see, the session ID is in the link, we dont want that! Altavista does not support cookies :-<

What worries me more is if you telnet to port 80 of NOXX.com and type
GET /index.php3 HTTP/1.1
Host: noxx.com

You will get:

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 07:47:27 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.3
X-Powered-By: PHP/3.0.16
Set-Cookie: Noxx_Sess=572c80457a0f582a4b123f310dea4793; expires=Sunday, 13-Aug-0
0 07:47:33 GMT; path=/
Location: http://noxx.com/index.php3?Noxx_Sess=572c80457a0f582a4b123f310dea4793
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

<THATS IT EMPTY PAGE HERE>
of course a modern (HTTP version 1.1>) browser jumps to the location url.
               
Does this mean that some search engines will see nothing more than that? They should understand :
Location: http://noxx.com/index.php3?Noxx_Sess=572c80457a0f582a4b123f310dea4793
But do all (or most) search engines do that? I doubt it.

The only solutions I see is;
Check with getenv("HTTP_AGENT") if its an browser or something else.
if browser: display page with page_open (....)
if something else: display standard page with kewords and metatags and exit, or maybe disable cookie fallback for this searchengines...

You comment please...
Maurice
NOXX.com