One of my sites has had a good penalty (I beleive), and I have been trying to figure out why for the longest time. I notcied today when I check a google search of http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=site:totallysweettattoos.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= - one of my pages (for celtic tattoos) was listed many times. It appears that when you hit any page on my site that end in .php, you can add any directory. For example, I have a page http://totallysweettattoos.com/dragon-tattoo-designs.php - and I can add http://totallysweettattoos.com/dragon-tattoo-designs.php/somedirectory/ onto it, and it will not give a 404, but the page without my css applied. Any suggestitions on how to combat this error? I don't know if this is what is causing my google penalty or not (its probably not), but it can't hurt to fix this. This seems to be the case on ym others sites, but they are not showing repeating pages in google. Thanks in advance!
Use full paths or relative paths like /css/css.css for everything. Include <link rel="canonical" href="http://totallysweettattoos.com/dragon-tattoo-designs.php" />
Yes. I should be using full paths for my css and image files. I realize that now. But isnt there some way to use mod_rewrite or something sililar so that when I type in http://totallysweettattoos.com/dragon-tattoo-designs.php/somedirectory/ it can rewrite the url to just http://totallysweettattoos.com/dragon-tattoo-designs.php - None of my pages uses any parameters. Why does php allow such syntax?
your host might have a feature enable that rather than showing a 404 it selects a close resemblance of the URL...and programatically ignores the extra...
The same thing works with one of my sites. Not sure why it's not with another... but it definitely has to do with your settings.