Question Removal of ?s= from URLs'

[RedWS600]

I have a few advertising CMS articles on the website, I received an email from them this morning asking why the '?=s' is in the URL,

eg.
/content/438-development-natural-gas-vehicles-ivecoa-s-new-strategy.html ? s = 0123ae3002c2f9d01c4eb7f8f0df5918

The customer is querying why are there soo many duplicate URL's

Looking into this, its a session variable created when no cookies are enabled. I suppose when a search engine is crawling the site it happens to create these session variables in the URL? is that correct?

A google search I came to this thread How to remove session ID's from vBulletin URL structure? so a good seo tool can get around it. I know DBSEO is a good tool, perhaps there is a way to remove the '?=s' is it wise to remove it?

Is it Possible to remove, if so is it wise?
If it can't be removed, then I may lose the customer due to bad SEO from duplicate URL's.

Hope you can help.

Many Thanks
Dan.

 

[Fillip H.]

It's generally not wise to attempt to remove the session ID from URLs, as it will break the entire forum for a subset of your users.

DBSEO will detect whether cookies are unavailable and re-add session hashes if so. Furthermore, if the referring page is a search engine, the hash will also be stripped to ensure there are no issues with session leaking.

If this was a problem with the mod, there would be widespread reports of this issue happening, so I'm inclined to believe it's a problem with the server. Maybe the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] variable isn't being set correctly by the server?

 

[RedWS600]

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.
How would I investigate the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] variable?
I'm not sure how the client got a list of the URL's with the '?s=', I will also ask that, as it would be handy for me to test.

 

[Fillip H.]

I'm honestly not sure how you would do it, the best bet would be to ask the system administrator as they should know how they configured the server.

 

[DragonByte Technologies]

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