Google Indexed URL Containing S= and Random Characters

Question

When logged into the Admin of Expression Engine, and then visiting the front of the site, sometimes the URL contains an S followed by lots of characters, like this:

www.mydomain.com/S=12a33f9e958c5a998383ba60cd1539210d1fb668/my-page

I recently found out Google has indexed a page on my site containing this URL and I wondered if anyone knows why, as this is obviously quite bad.

I noticed User Session Type was set to Session, so I changed that to Cookies, but I am just concerned about how Google indexed it with the session ID.

Answer 1

As you've stated the S stands for session, so EE can identify the user throughout the site visit using a query string. Google can't natively index these links, unless the Googlebot learns to create an account!

I don't know if your site is a member type site, but my guess is either a member of your site has published a link somewhere, or more likely, your client has followed the steps you describe to work out the path to an entry and used the path in a hard coded link - which may still be there. And Google has then index it.

Trouble is you can't use a third party tool to check your links, because it is a valid link, so you'll need to run searches in your database to check the content and templates for the "/S=" element of the URL.

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to de-index the offending URL.