Re: WO and Search Engines

HI all,

Thanks to all who replied.  Firstly, yes I am aware of the robots.txt  
file for excluding the bots.  I have actually had to do that today in  
order to determine if it is in fact the bots that are causing the  
problem, although I am 99% sure it is.  The point is (and I probably  
didn't make this clear) that I WANT the bots to come in, I just don't  
want the nightmare quantity of sessions they create.

Having read through Chuck's response on this issue to someone else a  
long time ago, I actually did change a large part of the site to use  
Direct Actions.  This has helped a lot but unfortunately the whole  
application is heavily dependent on the session.   It will mean a  
large amount of work to change it all.

If I was to use direct actions only and create a session when it's  
required, what is the best way to access the session once it has been  
created?  Would you create a reference to it in the Application class  
or something?  What I mean is, how would the next 'sessionless'  
direct action page use the session if it required it?  The point of  
using Direct Actions presumably being that it would not have any  
reference to any session as such.

Regards,
Dave.

On 15 Mar 2006, at 14:26, John Pollard wrote:

> 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
>
>
>