Hey everyone - I've was checking the site:www.____.com thingy in Yahoo and saw a couple of listings like the one above - in other words, the regular domain is listed, then a couple like this: http://www.something.com/?D=A http://www.something.com/?N=D http://www.something.com/?M=A Anybody know what this is, if it's benign or malevolent? Thanks.
Perhaps they are landing pages the site uses. Yahoo has found and listed one of my site's landing pages... with ad-ids. I plan on disallowing ours in robots.txt.
Everything after the '?' in the url is called the querystring. It's purpose is to pass data from one page to another. The target page would be 'dynamic' in that the same page can display lots of different stuff, usually info coming from a database. The specific code in the querystring tells the target page what data to display. So for example, most forums have a member list. Lets say that page is called: mysite.com/members.html Now let's assume that member names were listed on 'members.html' and shown as links, where the target page is: mysite/member-details.asp?mem_ID=23752 The target page is capable of displaying any member's info. But the "mem_ID=23752" part tells the page to get the info for member number 23752. So, this one page "member-details.asp" can display thousands of different member details. It really is a single page, but SEs often times don't realize it and crawl the same page 100 times because there are 100 users on the member list page, each with a different member ID. And often, they'll cache and list 100 pages seeing each one separately, when in fact they are all one page that is simply displaying different data sets. Is it benign or malevolent. . . 99% of the time it is simply how data from a database is handled. It certainly could be malevolent, but what I think you're asking is 'is it black hat SEO?' It can be used to make a search engine think you have 1000s of pages when in fact you have just one and a bunch of keywords in a database. Does that qualify as BH, not sure but it isn't honest and there really isn't much to gain from it anyway. /*tom*/
I encounter the same with you. Normally it's with an mp3 listed or just a link without content. I believe it's a directory without content.
I'm going to clear everything up for everyone. www.something.com was created by accident. In grade 8 or 9 my girlfriend was set a task in comp studies to make a website on the school intranet (just to prove to the teacher she could), however on mistake she put it as a .com and not part of the schools intranet. It sounds crazy but this is how it happened, it was all a mistake. It is not harmful to your computer in any way (unless it has been hacked). However me and Kristy (My Girlfriend) would like to edit this website, she is unsure of passwords etc. (I have no idea on how it works or what information you need), if anyone has any clue on how i can put my flash toons and thoughts on this website please post a reply! "It's coz' i couldn't think about what to make it about, and the teacher said 'just do something' so that's what i did" - Kristy.