Cookies
Search engines (crawlers) ignore cookies. This doesn't mean you can't use them, just don't rely on
them for contextual or session-related information essential to rendering pages that you want the search
engines to crawl.
There are two basic types of cookie:
-
Session based Cookies
- these cookies live until the user's session times out (IIS defaults this to 20 minutes). They're
often used to store informaton like "this user has already seen this advert on this visit".
-
Time Expiring Cookies
- these cookies live until a specified time. They are often used to store information like "this user
likes this stuff". In this way they can be used to display user appropriate information when this user next visits.
Search engines ignore both types of cookie.
The bottom line is that if a page cannot be seen correctly by a user that is not logged in, is arriving at
the site for the first time, and has no previous cookies, then the page cannot be seen correctly by the search engines.
This is the general case of the session state argument we covered elsewhere.
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