301 of 404 redirect on index page with parameters

[ray19833]

Hello,

Google indexed my website not the right way, the strange thing is that Google is indexing URL's that are removed about 1 year ago. This happened overnight i guess. Very strange.

The pages that are falsly indexed are in this way:

www.example.com/?f=1&pct=70&url=film.php%3Fid=3099%2526n=21

I altered the index page and now i redirect the page with a 301 header to /index.php if the parameter "f" is set. This works fine, but i don't know wheter to put a 301 redirect of a 404 redirect because it's the index page.

For now i did a 301 redirect, but i really need your expertise on this. Thank you very much in advance.

Kind regards,
Raymond

[tedster]

Google is indexing URL's that are removed about 1 year ago

That sounds like the definition of a 404 status to me.

[ray19833]

I agree, but i'm very careful because it's not blabla.html that is indexed wrong, but the index.php (with parameters) and i have no experience with redirecting the index.php with a 404 and the effect on the normale index.php. Any advice?

[tedster]

The query string makes it a different url, so only return a 404 status when there is a query string. If you currently have live urls that also use a query string, then your rule will need to take that into account.

[ray19833]

Thank you, i will fix this right away!