An Experiment of a Webmaster

So far Google Sitemaps is really interesting me. For those who don’t know, Google Sitemaps is googles attempt to let a webmaster describe the characteristics of their site, how often the pages change, and most importantly what pages exist at all. Googles crawler is extremely effective at browsing your whole site and indexing it, but like any automated system it has some issues. It has to recognise and avoid loops so it doesn’t keep requesting the file with just different things on the end like ?sid=. phpBB, the forum software, adds the ?sid= to your address if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled so they can track this person login. Google doesn’t use cookies so they’ll be given session IDs in their url unless you fix it. When this happens google thinks they are all different pages and has to sort it out, which is hazardous to your site since it may just give up and leave.
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