Does googlebot keep sessions when crawling?

asp.net session googlebot google-crawlers
MonsterMMORPG picture MonsterMMORPG · Oct 31, 2011 · Viewed 9.9k times · Source

When googlebot crawls pages does it have session? For example I am storing some variables on the session and using them in my site's pages. When googlebot crawls these pages will I still have the session-variables? In my global.asax I am storing some variables on the session at session start. Will I have any problem with Google bot?

Answer

MrWhite picture MrWhite · Jul 28, 2012

Googlebot actively tries to avoid sessions and does not support cookies. From First date with the Googlebot: Headers and compression (March 2008)

I usually avoid cookies (so no "Cookie:" header) since I don't want the content affected too much by session-specific info. And, if a server uses a session id in a dynamic URL rather than a cookie, I can usually figure this out, so that I don't end up crawling your same page a million times with a million different session ids.

I imagine most regular search engine bots will be similar in this respect. Google is trying to build an index of unique URLs. The URL is the unique key that identifies a unique page of content. Cookies (and sessions) are not passed when a user clicks a link in the SERPS. Google is primarily indexing pages, not sites.

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