Duplicate content from query strings in site: command results

[zammo]

Hi

We have a problem with one of our websites. we have run a site: command in Google to get the number of URL's indexed but we are getting a large number of homepage duplicates showing up with query strings attached. All these URls go straight through to the homepage.

e.g. the site:www.example.com brings back

http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/index.asp?m=green
http://www.example.com/index.asp?m=blue

etc etc.

We are sure there are no links anywhere on the site or off the site which use these query strings in links. Does anyone have any ideas as to why Google might be indexing these?

Thanks

[theBear]

"We are sure there are no links anywhere on the site or off the site which use these query strings in links."

Well how do you know that there aren't such links on the entire WWW?

"Does anyone have any ideas as to why Google might be indexing these?"

Because it found links in that form on the WWW.

[zammo]

Thanks for the reply,

if these links are elsewhere on the web is there anyway we can find where they would be? I have tried simply pasting the query string into Google but this does not bring back any sites other than our own.

[theBear]

Well if the source of the links is still in the index. using inurl:query string should locate them.

[g1smd]

You can either disallow them using robots.txt but you'll lose any PR benefit there might be.

Better still would be to set up a wildcard 301 redirect that takes any and all index file URLs and redirects them all to www.domain.com/ each time.