Completely eliminating session ids from URLs

As some may know, vbulletin uses cookies to track session ids. If cookies are disabled, vbulletin uses session ids in the URLs to track users. In order to prevent search engines from indexing session IDs, vbulletin automatically removes session IDs when it sees that a search bot (like googlebot) is browsing. It only does this for pre-programmed bots. The problem is, search engines may be or may have already implemented hidden indexing of sites to check for black-hat SEO techniques. Actually what VB does may be kind of considered black-hat (or grey hat) by some engines since it has unique content/urls just for the search engines. This has nothing to to with VBSEO, but is perhaps VBSEO could remedy.

My question is, why not just give admins the option to completely disable session IDs in URLs? VB does not have this option. If a member doesn't have cookies enabled, they will not be able to log in, but that isn't a big problem for me considering the possible benefits. I would prefer that search engines and guests see the same content and not be manipulated the way VB is attempting.

So I guess I'm wondering if that could be a feature of VBSEO (disabling sessions IDs in URLS completely).

PS: I have seen cases where pages with session IDs have PR from google, which indicates VB is not 100% effective at eliminating them from search bots.

-vissa

I think if you add:

PHP Code:

ini_set('url_rewriter.tags', ''); 


To one of the scripts that gets included into everything in vbulletin, that will stop php from ammending session ids.

There's probably a way to do it in .htaccess as well, but I don't know how to do it off the top of my head

by default, vbseo removes all traces of session id's (with one bug that is to be fixed with RC4) already.

is it possible to get sessions for registered members back?