My shopping cart automatically adds a session ID in the URL after a "?" and it's messing up my store's ability to be indexed by search engines. Can I use MOD_REWRITE to cut the URL down so that there is no query string at all? I would be fine with having cookies required to shop at my site as the last set of stats I read stated that 99.6% of all browsers have cookies enabled these days. My store doesn't use query strings at all except for the session ID.

I was told that MOD_REWRITE can only change how the URL is displayed and that that wouldn't help in it's getting indexed by engines that don't like ?s in the URL. I'm hoping this isn't true. Any one know?

Thanks!

yes mod_rewrite can do this and I believe it will help search engine indexing your website better. Amazon is a good example that does this.

Cheers

Hmm, I don't know about this. The problem is that your shopping cart scripts are outputing the long link into the pages it generates. If the SEs don't like spidering those links then mod_rewrite is not going to help because it can rewrite the URL only once it has received the HTTP request. Too late if the SEs don't want to follow the long link.