Cookie and Session id

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Cookie and Session id

cloaking with cookie and session ids

venus

9:58 am on Mar 19, 2008 (gmt 0)

I know that Session id and cookie are used to track user behavior and are used by most websites as a marketing strategy. However search engines spiders don't accept them.
This however sounds like a kind of cloaking. For instance, if I have a couple of links on a page and don't want spiders to crawl them, I may make the process of enabling session id and cookie mandatory and not let spiders crawl it. Isn't that possible?

volatilegx

11:38 pm on Mar 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

You could keep spiders from accessing that content in that way, or you could simply exclude those pages in robots.txt. This really isn't cloaking.

venus

9:53 am on Mar 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Thanks volatilegx for helping me once again :)
I understand that if I exclude some of the pages in robots.txt, that isn't cloaking. But what if I make session is and cookie mandatory and exclude some pages from the eye of search engines?
I guess in that way it shows different content to users and search engines( as visitors would enable cookie and session id in their browsers and spiders won't be able to perform any such operation). Will it amount to cloaking? and are there any chances of getting penalized?

volatilegx

8:13 pm on Apr 6, 2008 (gmt 0)

What I meant was your idea to exclude those who don't use the session ID isn't cloaking. You shouldn't see a penalty, other than that those pages won't be indexed. In other words, the pages that do not force session IDs to be used should not be penalized.