Re: WO and Search Engines

David,

Our WO ecommerce applications, such as www.glovesonhand.co.uk, avoid 
creating sessions until they are needed. All product or information pages 
can be browsed without a session being triggered; all are served up by 
direct action methods. Direct action methods operate fine with or without 
sessions depending on context.

If a customer adds something to the shopping basket or does something else 
that requires we remember who they are, the session is created then. To 
avoid the spiders doing this, you tell them not to add things to your 
shopping basket by excluding these URLs in robots.txt or equivalent.

The result is a site that is friendly to spiders, good for bookmarking and 
not wasteful of memory / sessions when not necessary and consequently 
probably faster because any instance of the server can server a direct 
action method whereas one session is tied to one application instance.

John