traderzoe

Our site has community blogs where visitors can post to various topics within many different communities. We recently partnered with an associate to offer share our communities and community blog with them. When visiting either site you can login to post.

We implemented a single sign on (common login) so that users of either website could move between both sites and post on both without having to login again.

This is accomplished by redirecting the visitor on first visit to the single sign-on domain to see if they have a session and set a cookie for that domain authenticating their session.

Works great.

However, as soon as we implemented the SSO we started getting redirect errors at Google Webmaster Tools, indicating that URLs were not being followed. Upon further investigation we discovered that none of the "new" websites urls were being indexed at all due to redirect errors.

As best we can tell is that since bots don't use cookies, everytime it tries to load any page on either domain it gets confused by the redirects (minimum of 3 redirects) to authenticate the session (if necessary) and ultimately quits.

I was wondering if any one here has dealth with a similar single sign on (SSO) or common login/authentication for multiple sites and how they did it without making the great god googlebot unhappy.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Our website is http://cotradeco.com/
The new website is http://topsportsbets.com/


Thank you in advance for your thoughts, advice, and wisdom.

__________________
http://cotradeco.com/
Network, meet people, & swap stories stories and news at the community lodge or do some shopping at the trading post.

traderzoe

If it helps shed any light on this, the Drupal community has experienced the same problem with a single sign on module they created.

http://industriousone.com/drupal-single-sign-vs-sitemap

In their case, the only solution seemed to be programatically stopping the direct based on user agent.

However, this method surely will be detected as cloaking? Or will it? And that is why I am consulting here.

__________________
http://cotradeco.com/
Network, meet people, & swap stories stories and news at the community lodge or do some shopping at the trading post.