I just posted about Teleflora’s site design, and in doing a little digging I noticed they had t
I found their page for “A Dozen Premium Red Roses” and “Two Dozen Premium Red Roses” and was curious how they ranked for terms like “dozen red roses”, etc. Interestingly, their pages use an ID parameter, which I had heard before is not a great idea b/c “id” as a parameter is often tied to session IDs, which create multiple URL parameter versions for different users and thus would look like tons of pages to a search engine, all with duplicate content.
In a recent post, Matt Cutts mentioned:
I mentioned that because the parameter “id” is often used for session IDs, Googlebot used to avoid urls with “?id=(let’s say a five digit or larger number)” but that I didn’t know if that was still true.
I thought the same thing, but in Teleflora’s case they have 5 characters and the page is getting indexed – and in fact ranking quite nicely for a desireable search phrase. Perhaps Google SiteMaps can help sort this out if you happen to be using “id” as a parameter and that does identify new, unique content rather than as a session ID?
Interested more in URL parameters and indexing, user considerations, etc? See this page on Rand’s site under the heading “URLs, Title Tags & Meta Data”.