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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T12:22:51+00:00

I have a website where I am splitting my traffic into two user groups

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I have a website where I am splitting my traffic into two user groups “learners” and “instructors”. I hold their user group in a session variable and direct them to the relevant section of their site.

I am having problems with search engines not indexing the site due to them not having the user_type cookie set. Is there a way I can allow the search engine crawler access to both sections of the site (at the moment it gets stuck in an loop from the user_type selection page to the homepage).

I would also ideally like to be able to allow the crawler access to the member-only resources as there will be content that learner drivers will be able to access that I would prefer was only accessible once logged in.

The code checking the session variable user_type is below and is called on every page (hence why nothing is getting crawled)

    if($check_exists==TRUE) {
        $this->session->set_userdata('referrer', current_url());
        if (strlen($this->session->userdata('user_type'))==0) {
            redirect('/user_type/');
        }
    } else if($check_exists==FALSE) {
        if (strlen($this->session->userdata('user_type'))>0) {
            redirect('/home/');
        }
    }
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The concept you are using to handle both user types (learner and teacher) is wrong from a SEO perspective. In most cases, you should never have to different content sharing a single URL.

    In your case, http://www.road2driving.co.uk/home redirects to http://www.road2driving.co.uk/user_type if no cookie is found. A web crawler will ignore your cookie, and will be caught in a loop. If you want to index both pages, you need to drop the cookie based navigation and create 2 separate sections of your site.

    http://www.road2driving.co.uk/home should be your current http://www.road2driving.co.uk/user_type page. Meaning that /home will display 2 links for the learner and teacher sections.

    Then create a learn section and a teach section, using a sub-folder for example. You will have:

    That way all sections of your site be accessible by a crawler.

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