yahoo serps, site under attack?

[linuxguy]

Just launched a new site a few days ago. It's index it's in Google, none in MSN and for my surprise Yahoo already catched a few pages. But Yahoo is listing tons of spammy looking address that donot exist on my webpage and that instead get redirected to my index. I didn't create this links: www.widgets.com?Keywords=credit+cardaddargs=03u3hs9yoajk0KQTCEBBCTfwTzuiEchzBM8C...
www.widgets.com?Keywords=health+insurace+addargs=03u3hs9yoajk0KQTCEBBCTfwTzuiEchzBM8C...
and tons more similar to this. Any ideas?

[superclown2]

Here's your answer:
[help.yahoo.com...]

[abates]

superclown2: those URLs aren't in the format Slurp uses when testing for 404 status.

[jdMorgan]

This is a new site, but is it a new *domain*? Perhaps it was previously-owned?

Anyway, it will take far more than 'a few days' for the SEs to spider your site properly.

Jim

[linuxguy]

The name is very unique, not a chance that it was previously owned. It thought some one was creating this fake links that point to my domain to affect my rankings. They all end up landing in the index. Not sure how my server is responding to this crafted URL's.

[LunaC]

If it was my site, I'd check the address in the internet archive to be sure it wasn't used before.

Next, I'd check the header response that those URLs are sending (If you're a firefox user, the Live http headers extension is the best I've found for checking). If they are returning a code 200 that could cause a lot of trouble for you. (The search engines will see them as different pages with the content of your index... major duplicate content.)

If they are returning a 200 OK, I'd 301 (permanent redirect) all unused query strings either to the index or try to get a 410 (gone) response on them. There's code in the apache forum here that will help with that.

[edited by: LunaC at 1:26 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2006]