Yahoo site explorer

Just tried it on a site, and lots of questions

[madmatt69]

Hey everyone,

Just tried the yahoo site explorer and found that it's indexed a bunch of strange URL's for one of my sites.

For one, several URL's have been appended with variables like?D=M or M=A. No clue what that means or why they appear, as the site is static. When you click on the link, it gets sent to a 403 Not Authorized page on my site.

Also, I've noticed Yahoo also has indexed a few pages which I have blocked (in theory, it would seem) by robots.txt and meta noindex tags. It's also indexed some empty directories.

Anyways those are just some observations, and I suppose it's good to know if this indicates a problem crawling my site for Yahoo?

Has anyone else seen anything similar to the above?

[Nutter]

I had the same problem with?D=A,?D=D type query strings. Best I can tell, those query strings are used if you view a directory listing to determine what order the files are sorted in. No clue why they show up other places, though.

Ultimately wound up using a mod_rewrite to a 410 to kill the requests.

[madmatt69]

Thanks for the response.

I haven't seen those strings show up in my referal logs at all, but where else have you seen them pop up other than site explorer? Have you found they negatively (or otherwise) impact those pages, or the yahoo serps?