Duplicate Content Cofusion With Bizrate.com Through Google

Duplicate content google bizrate

[justgowithit]

I have been trying to figure out why my site has been getting the PR0 from Google for months now, and I think I'm finally onto something. Virtually the day the site was launched we dropped a datafeed to bizrate.com for their PPC program. It never struck me that there would ever be any relation between these pages and Google, especially since Bizrate is about as far from a static site as one could get. The problem is here.

When I search Google for "Mysite site:Mysite.com" I get all the URL's that google has indexed, but I also get indentical URL's ending with "!mid=12345". I have used "12345" as an example, but the numbers are always the same. I have traced this code back to Bizrate.com. It is some kind of identity number used for my account and products that is somehow getting added to the exact URL by Google and being interpreted as an identical or mirrored URL (I'm assuming).

For instance the "real" URL is: http://www.example.com/product/widget1/hereitis.html

and the URL that Google is displaying in their search results (that doesn't even exist) is:
http://www.example.com/product/widget1/hereitis.html!mid=12345

The ironic thing is that when this bad link is clicked on in the Google rankings it comes up with a 505 not found error but the index displays it anyway.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here, if it's effecting my site with Google? Has this happened to anyone before?

[edited by: Marcia at 6:21 am (utc) on Feb. 4, 2004]
[edit reason] Changed mysite to example.com [/edit]