Does googlebot keep sessions when crawling?

Question

When googlebot crawls pages does it have session? For example I am storing some variables on the session and using them in my site's pages. When googlebot crawls these pages will I still have the session-variables? In my global.asax I am storing some variables on the session at session start. Will I have any problem with Google bot?

Answer 1

Googlebot actively tries to avoid sessions and does not support cookies. From First date with the Googlebot: Headers and compression (March 2008)

I usually avoid cookies (so no "Cookie:" header) since I don't want the content affected too much by session-specific info. And, if a server uses a session id in a dynamic URL rather than a cookie, I can usually figure this out, so that I don't end up crawling your same page a million times with a million different session ids.

I imagine most regular search engine bots will be similar in this respect. Google is trying to build an index of unique URLs. The URL is the unique key that identifies a unique page of content. Cookies (and sessions) are not passed when a user clicks a link in the SERPS. Google is primarily indexing pages, not sites.

Answer 2

The answer to one of your question is: yes, you will have problems with Google bot.

Generally we've encountered two types of issues with google bot:

1. it sometimes does not retain HTTP cookies between requests. Our application relies on custom cookies and the there were plenty of google bot requests caught to carry no cookies at all.

2. it makes long breaks between consecutive requests. For example, it retrieves your page and asks for it's scripts later on.

Both will cause troubles with your session. First - you need a precise ASPNETSessionID cookie to be passed between requests. Googlebot will probably sometimes fail to do that. Second - if there's a long timespan between requests, your session is going to terminate even if the cookie is there.