Forum Moderators: open
I have suffered a recent dramatic drop in my ranking for the home page of my site. In fact, it doesn't even come up for a search on my company name. I did some digging today and I've come to find out that Yahoo! has 2 versions of my home page listed, one with a query string parameter and one without. What I mean is this:
[example.com...]
[example.com...]
This happened because I was redirecting some ancient urls that Yahoo still tries to index and I redirected one to my home page without stripping the query string off. It's been like this for years but it seems that it has just now become a problem.
My question is: how do I deal with this situation? Do I issue a 404 when they try to index the version with the query string? Should I issue a 301 redirect? If I send a 404 are they going to think that the version without the query string is gone?
Any insight would be appreciated.
