Yahoo and variable strings

Discussion in 'Yahoo' started by Cygnus, Jun 5, 2006.

  1. #1
    Is it just me, or has Yahoo taken a few steps back when it comes to understanding what is or is not duplicate content, based on variable strings.

    We have a few sites that make use of variable strings as a convenient aspx method for personalization...unfortunately, Yahoo was stupid enough to register each possible variable string as an individual page, and kicked us into some sort of dupe filter.

    Let's take 3 pages from a site: fish.aspx, bird.aspx, and dog.aspx. Each of these pages offers the ability for a user to add a link on that site; the URL is something like:
    addalink.aspx?ref=fish
    or
    addalink.aspx?ref=bird
    etc

    This was fine for quite some time, but Yahoo has really lost it recently, and now is instead of just seeing addalink.aspx as one page, is thinking each variable passed is its own page -- it is killing us.

    Now, this is a more simplistic example, and workarounds for that are pretty easy, however the question to be begged is: should workarounds even be necessary? The SE should simply see the main page, and if the content displayed is X% the same, just index that one version of the page. As it is, I'm afraid we'll have to put disallows on each variable string rather than just the addalink.aspx -- ideas?

    Cygnus
     
    Cygnus, Jun 5, 2006 IP
  2. Cygnus

    Cygnus Cat Herder

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    #2
    Doh!

    I just noticed that on one of our affiliate programs that several of the affiliate URLs got indexed too...this is getting silly. They don't know the difference between variable and page anymore.
     
    Cygnus, Jun 5, 2006 IP
  3. mad4

    mad4 Peon

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    #3
    Yeah, stupid Yahoo. :rolleyes:

    How can they know that page.asp?var=cat is the same page as page.asp?var=dog?????????

    You need to take action to stop them seeing these pages or 301 them to the right place.
     
    mad4, Jun 5, 2006 IP
  4. Cygnus

    Cygnus Cat Herder

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    #4
    301ing is a simple solution for a few pages, but when you have hundreds of affiliates, each using dozens of campaign sub_ids, that isn't so feasible. Yahoo needs to understand that not every URL should be treated as is; some are true landing pages, and some are just passing information to those landing pages.
     
    Cygnus, Jun 5, 2006 IP
  5. mad4

    mad4 Peon

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    #5
    Maybe they should be a bit cleverer. The fact remains that the slightest difference in url's will be counted as a different url.

    For example site.com/blog is different to site.com/blog/

    We know that the bugs exist in the 3 major search engines so its up to us to create websites accordingly.
     
    mad4, Jun 5, 2006 IP
  6. Cygnus

    Cygnus Cat Herder

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    #6
    Mad4,

    I agree that we need to create websites that conform to SE friendly practices, though it looks like Yahoo's indexing bug has grown entirely out of proportion -- through my research into this varible string indexing, I have determined an effective method to go Yahoobowling, even though I won't use it in that matter.

    How does it work? Simple.
    1. Find URL you want to bowl.
    2. Place links to URL/whateverurlstringyouwant
    3. Repeat #2 for a variety of phrases; in our case, some jackass got PHPnuke strings indexed for an ASPX site -- we don't use PHP at all, yet Yahoo still indexed those strings. There are so many with the same content (no content), that BOOM...dupe filtering.

    Hopefully that makes more sense about why I feel this is such a big problem; by posting this bowling information here I hope that Yahoo will see it and fix it -- I've contacted them repeatedly about it, to no avail, so now it goes public. Maybe now they'll fix it.

    Cygnus
     
    Cygnus, Jun 6, 2006 IP