Updated your osCommerce Spiders.txt file lately?

A lot of osCommerce sites have out of date spiders.txt files.  People forget that new spiders come along every year and an out of date spiders.txt file can cause problems if you are using sessions to control your shopping cart.
Don’t know? Then must look in Admin Configuration Session

If you have Force Cookie Use set to False then you are using Sessions. 
Using Sessions means that when someone arrives at your site, a session id will be created for them.  It is usually shown in the site URL.   For example,  osCsid=a0a69ee0329eba7676473706625c8acd  To stop spiders from indexing the site using the osCSid, you need to set Prevent Spider Sessions to True.    However this only stops spiders that are listing in your spiders.txt file from creating sessions.  New spiders will still be able to create them. 
So what does it matter if they create a session?  If someone clicks on a search engine result that contains a URL with an osCSid in it then they will be sharing the shopping cart of the search engine spider.  They will add an item to their cart and suddenly discover there are already other items in it already.  That kind of experience is “spooky’ for customers and they quickly mistrust the security of your site and leave.
Bottom line?  Go download the latest osCommerce Spider.txt file and load it your site includes folder.  Don’t know how?  Contact us and we’ll do it for free.