[Phplib-users] robots and session-id's

[Sascha W. <sas...@gm...>]

Hi out there,

I'm coding a shop with the help of phplib (thanks a lot to all the 
developers at this point).
One purpose is, that every page with products-infos can be indexed by 
search-engines to make the rare products more findable - so I can't lock 
all pages for robots.

At this point I was pretty astonished, that I found no standard-solution to 
prevent urls with session-id's to be indexed by robots!

All hints I found (most in the archive of this list) recommended to check 
$HTTP_USER_AGENT against a list of known user-agents and then not to start 
phplib-page-management-functions if a robot was identified.
For me this seems not to be very usable as I think it's hard to maintain an 
actual list of ALL relevant search-engines.


Now my questions:

- Does anyone know a better (perfect and simple) solution for this problem?

OR

- Wouldn't it be more simple and effective to check $HTTP_USER_AGENT 
against some valid user-agent-strings from browsers?
(At least every browser does have something like "...compatible; MSIE..." 
in his string and I guess this list is shorter and easyier to maintain as a 
list of robots)
Does anyone know some PROs and CONs for this assumption?


Thanks in advance,

Sascha.