Strange URLs in site: operator results

[Cromagnon]

When I do a site:www.example.com some of my URL's has a extension like this ex:?ref=another-example.org

It is a basic html-site, so I do not know where the extensions comes from. It seems like Google sees them as real pages and my main URL are deleted from the result

It looks like this:

www.example.com/topic.htm?ref=another-eaxmple.org (represented in the result)

www.example.com/topic.htm (not represented in the results)

I am worried about some copy content issues.

Where do the extension come from and how can I solve this issue?

Anyone?

Cromagnon

[edited by: tedster at 7:57 pm (utc) on Feb. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

That extra bit is called a query string, and apparently your site is not using query strings to determine what content is returned for a url. Where they come from you may never know, but you can instruct Google (and other search engines that support pattern matching "wild cards") not to index any url with a query string by placing this rule in your robots.txt file:

To block access to all URLs that include a question mark (?), you could use the following entry:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

[google.com...]

Once that rule is in place, you could then request a url removal through your Webmaster Tools account.

Another approach would be to use a 301 redirect that removes the query string from a url. This would preserve any link juice that comes from a website that appends the query string in a link to your site.

[Cromagnon]

Thanks. Very helpfull.

[wilderness]

There's an old thread in either the Apache Server forum or Search Engine Spider Identification forum that pertains to hijacking of page links in a manner similar.

[Cromagnon]

I have now tried to implement a .htaccess redirect as this:

Redirect 301 /?ref=another-example.org http://www.example.com

But that does not seems to work.

Any idea?

This "redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.another-site.com" works properly...

Hmm?

[edited by: tedster at 9:10 pm (utc) on Feb. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] de-link the urls [/edit]

[tedster]

You're getting into an Apache webserver issue more than a Google Search issue, and those technical questions are best discussed in the Apache Forum [webmasterworld.com] itself, if you can't find an answer already there.

How about this thread?

Query string redirect [webmasterworld.com]