WMT shows an iframe in referer and ua

[slipkid]

This recently hit my logs from 121.***.90.97 which is IP blocked and 403s.

"GET / HTTP/1.0" 403 463 "http://www.example.com/?iframe=true&width=95%25&height=95%25" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.00"

Immediately returns from 121.***.90.97 which is IP blocked and 403s"

"GET /?iframe=true&width=95%25&height=95%25 HTTP/1.0" 403 463 "http://www.example.com/?iframe=true&width=95%25&height=95%25" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.00"

Have no idea what is going on with the iframe.

The hit shows up in WMT tools as a duplicate to my home page.

Does anyone have any idea what this is all about?

[edited by: tedster at 1:59 pm (utc) on Sep 1, 2012]
[edit reason] obscure the IP address [/edit]

[lucy24]

What's behind the directory slash / in real life? Something static like html, or something dynamic like php?

Quick detour to my own (static) site confirms that I can slather on any kind of garbage after the page name. (Separate issue from PathInfo which involves additional directory slashes.)

Interesting technical question there. If your directory names canonicalize to / as they should, how does g### know whether it's something that accepts queries or something that doesn't? Do we all have to start forcibly redirecting requests that will rarely-to-never occur, just to avoid Duplicate Content issues?

The 95%25 part is simply the url-encoded form of 95%. Yes, a percent sign can itself be encoded ;) But you knew that.

[aakk9999]

Do we all have to start forcibly redirecting requests that will rarely-to-never occur, just to avoid Duplicate Content issues?

I've seen this happen - not just because someone links like this to you, but even Google sometimes tries to add spurious query string (or just additional QS parameters) and tries to get the page.

This is why it is a good idea to use canonical link element in addition to setting up redirects. Ideally, the home page should always have canonical link element set up.

[slipkid]

About 10 weeks ago, changed all my www.example.com/index.html internal links to www.example.com/ .

I have been reading here on WebmasterWorld that I should add a 301 redirect to htaccess to grab referrers that had not picked up the "/" change from either crawling or reading sitemap.xml . About ten days ago, added the appropriate code to redirect www.example.com/index.html to www.example.com/ and then this mysterious iframe referrer comes along about 3 days later.

I do not have a canonical reference on www.example.com/ denoting it as the preferred URI.

As an aside, I tried to do a simple redirect from non-www to www and the standard code does not work on my server. I tried every possible change to code I have learned in using regexp to get this redirect to work but no joy.

All my 301s in htaccess work as they should. I have digressed.

[slipkid]

Just checked WMT and the duplicate page for my home page www.example.com/ with the iframe reference is gone!

Weird.

[lucy24]

As an aside, I tried to do a simple redirect from non-www to www and the standard code does not work on my server. I tried every possible change to code I have learned in using regexp to get this redirect to work but no joy.

Take a stroll over to apache next door ;) Now, we would never tell you to cut & paste code, but the with/without www redirect question does come up several times a week...

[slipkid]

Will do.

Thanks for your help.