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Cookies required?
Cookies are short pieces of text that your Web browser can
remember for the Web site you're visiting. The Web site canalso
tell your browser application to save the cookie to your hard
disk for future reference.
Web sites use cookies to personalize information (e.g. "Hello
Your Name" on Amazon.com), to help remember login information
or simply to collect demographic information.
For this reason, cookies have always been a source of controversy
related to online privacy. Nevertheless, most online store
pages require cookies to work.
Can your visitors view your Web site only if they accept
cookies? If so, you should know that cookies can stop search
engines to index your Web site. People can fill out forms
and accept cookies but search engines can't.
If search engine software programs hit a Web page that insists
on cookies before displaying the page, they could index the
wrong text and abandon further indexing.
Just look at this search
result and you'll see that cookies even prevent popular
Web sites from getting indexed by search engines.
No, it's not an April fool's joke, the #1 result is indeed
Starbucks.com.
Another
example from AllTheWeb
On its webmaster pages, Google gives the following advice:
"If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session
ID's, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of
your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may
have trouble crawling your site."
Other such barriers to search engine indexing can be broken
links and password-protected Web pages.
Google's webmaster guidelines that include the advice above:
http://www.Google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
More information about cookies in general:
http://www.CookieCentral.com/faq/
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