session ids and search engines

[adam_gardner]

hi all,

first off, i'm really really sorry if this has been seen a thousand times ... but it seems like everyone has a differing opinion on this one.

ok easiest way is to show you the page - www.lumoslighting.co.uk splits into two sub-sites - domestic.lumoslighting.co.uk and commercial.lumoslighting.co.uk


now - if you browse to either sub-site, on first load, you'll notice the categories on the left all have session id's attached to them - these are needed for when a guest browses the site, adds stuff to cart and then goes to checkout (which requires registration, then products are carried with them)

however, the search engines seem to have a problem with session ids (because of the potentially unlimited amount of urls they can spider) so they tend to leave them alone and not spider them. (apparently)


my question(s) is/are this -

1. Do the search engines care about session ids? (please only a definitive answer)

2. How can i get rid of them and still allow guests to have cart functionality? (i do not wish to use cookies - the site was developed like this and it will take major time / money to have it altered - not feasable.)

3. the engines crawling this site is paramount - no rankings - no income.


4. does anyone have any good lighting sites that will link to us? :P


thanks for your time in replying!


regards,

Adam

[adam_gardner]

^^ bump ^^