Skip to content

Magento – Removing session id ?___SID=U from the URL

By Stephen Blake
23 February 2011 @ 17:55

Today I rolled out a new Magento site and for the first time in almost 2 years of doing Magento development I had the session id appended to the url, namely: ?___SID=U

This was driving me mad and I didn’t want search engines to index the site with the “?___SID=U” in the URL, so I wanted to fix it asap.

Generally when I have a problem, there is usually someone else in the world who has had the same issue, so I searched the web and Magento forums for an answer. I couldn’t find any conclusive answers and seeing as though the Magento technical documentation is notoriously limited I had to find the solution myself.

So, here’s the simple solution:

  1. Go to System > Configuration > Web > Session Validation Settings
  2. Set Use SID on Frontend to “No”

Pretty simple, but I’m sure that it has caused frustration to a number of Magento developers out there so I hope that helps you dudes!

Tags: , , , .

10 comments

10 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Magento开发 said
    on May 12, 2011

    I also encountered this problem, thanks for your sharing.

  2. vlad fratila said
    on May 31, 2011

    Thanks for sharing! This tip was helpful

  3. UK Fishing said
    on July 14, 2011

    Try this solution if the above doesn’t work – App.php (mod)…
    http://www.zetaprints.com/magentohelp/remove-session-id-from-mageto-url/

  4. magento developer said
    on September 13, 2011

    Nice post real helpful to me thanks for the help

  5. Angela said
    on October 7, 2011

    Yes, these session ids are really very bad for SEO. Еhey create a lot of duplicate pages and we must get rid of them.

  6. Ralph Stirrat said
    on October 17, 2011

    Great tip thank you. Saved my magento site!

  7. Wilfred said
    on November 16, 2011

    Thanks for giving me the solution to my question

  8. Matrassen said
    on December 5, 2011

    Thanks for the sharing. i switched it off. I only saw this SID after the client made an conversion…

  9. Dima said
    on February 12, 2012

    Thanks

  10. Ankit said
    on February 16, 2012

    I did the configuration setting, but still sometimes magento appends SID=U to URL.s.

Some HTML is OK

(required)

(required, but never shared)

or, reply to this post via trackback.