PHP Coding Error

?&site

[kellyman]

Hi Guys

Im trying to get to the bottom of an issue i have, I have a site and have seen Google visit (example) mysite.com/?&site=elvis

I got my web developer to check everything and could not find that URL string

went into my webmaster tools and now Google is seeing that as a duplicate page to my site which has passed PR , it may be nothing but why would this be picked up, the string will not report a 404 error in fact i tried that on many sites and none do report a 404



is this common, is it somthing i should be concerned about and more importantly how has a URL been created

Thanks in advance

[jatar_k]

it's not a 404

the url is valid
mysite.com/

after the ? is only a query string that is submitted to the page

as far as why it would be listed as a dupe, theoretically it isn't a dupe, it's actually the exact same page, as every query string submitted to that page would be a dupe (or exactly the same), as long as the page does not return different content based on those params

so they report it correctly, though I would hope they would do nothing with that data in this case.

[kellyman]

Many thanks for the reply

I spoke to my develpoer today and he said exactly the same, its only when i see webmaster tools list it as a duplicate i got concerned maybe an error on googles part but i have seen bots visit it in the past, the actual page don't exist so strange why it lists the page

I will put a 301 on this just in case, and keep an eye on it

Many thanks again

[Wayder]

I used to have quite a few problems with this because when an item was removed from my database, the URL still existed and delivered a page, it just wasn’t the page that it was supposed to deliver. I now deliver a 404 page when the query does not find the item and show an alternative item to the client.

ie. The item you selected is no longer available, here is a list of similar stuff that I want to flog to you. Jaguar, Porsche $25 off if you buy two etc...

I know some people 301 the page, but as it shouldn’t exist, then I think it really should be a 404.

Ray...