Redirect URLs do they cause a problem

Strange links in inurl:domain search

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

When I search inurl:www.mydomainanme.co.uk I get some results that look like this:

http://click.example.com/go2/2/ps/1cF117610B/[ long string of alphabetical characters ]/http/www.mydomain.co.uk:80/

When I click on these they redirect to my home page.

I know that duplicate content and redirections can be a problem for Google. Is anyone else seeing this kind of URL? Are these likely to cause a problem/penalty as far as Google is concerned?

Best wishes

Sid

[edited by: ciml at 1:27 pm (utc) on Dec. 31, 2003]
[edit reason] Shortened URL [/edit]

[Hissingsid]

Further to the above when I go to a well known search engine that uses results from the search engine that appears to be creating these unusual redirected URLs, I find that this exact form of the URL is used and that the SE site does not have a robots.txt file. You just get a 404 error page.

I guess that someone must have a canned find on their page somewhere into this particular search engine. My site is #1 and Googlebot has found his way along the redirect to my site.

This is happenning but is it going to cause Google to penalise my site in any way. It looks to Google like two URLs duplicate content.

Anyone like to comment?

Best wishes

Sid

[Hissingsid]

Come on guys I need some help on this one.

Best wishes

Sid

[dirkz]

> When I click on these they redirect to my home page.

Try (with a header checker) to find out how it's redirected. If it's a 302, it's doesn't do any harm. If it's a 301, it even transfers PR. If it's something else, it depends.

[Hissingsid]

Thanks Dirkz,

It's a 302.

Best wishes

Sid

[dasboot]

Dirkz,

Why are you confident that an unwanted 302 re-direct doesn't do any harm? Certainly 302 re-directs have caused many, many problems with not-www and www listings in Google in the past.

When this occurs, and a page is indexed twice, Google generally filters out one of the listings from the SERPs.

There is no control over which one is chosen. If G decides to filter out the correct URL, and 'display*' a FAST glitch instead, that could mean serious trouble.

'display' is in quote marks, because in reality it will never show up in the SERPs - unless you type in the whole, alpha-numeric, 'cuckoo' string.

[dirkz]

> Certainly 302 re-directs have caused many, many problems with not-www and www listings in Google in the past.

I vaguely remember some posts here, but thought it was about 301s. Do you have any flags regarding this?

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

I tracked down where these URLs were comming from. A black dog search engine didn't have a robots.txt file in its root and googlebot was able to spider search results. Not sure where it found the link to get into the results though.

I wrote to the webmaster at the search engine and he/she has now put in a robots.txt file so hopefully these dodgy URLs will stop now.

Best wishes

Sid