Google indexing the wrong pages

[madmatt69]

Hey everyone,

On each of my pages on a particular site I have a tell-a-friend form. Basically the link looks like "tellafriend.php?url=thispage.html".

Clicking on the link opens a popup where people can type in the address they want to send it. Pretty standard.

I just found out that Google has indexed the tellafriend form for every single page! About 4000+ pages.

All of them are the same, just a different "send" url.

I suppose I could block this in robots.txt which I will do, but any potential penalty for all this?

Basically 4000 identical tellafriend pages, only difference is the url that's to be sent. Dup penalty perhaps?

I never thought google would spider that..certainly not 4000 times either :) Surprising.

[encyclo]

You need to add this to the tellafriend.php script to make it appear in the head of the incorrectly indexed pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

The pages will drop out of the index in time.