Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    6
    1131
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • friendoffood
      friendoffood last edited by

      It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website:

      www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123

      www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456

      etc..

      How is this normally handled?  Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors.

      I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • lfrazer
        lfrazer last edited by

        Hello,

        I am also having this issue with hundreds of dummy urls that never existed as a part of our website's blog. Do I go into parameters and specify each of the dummy urls to avoid this?

        Thanks in advance for any help!!!! (and sorry to piggyback this question Theodore-hope you don't mind!)

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • friendoffood
          friendoffood @Ray-pp last edited by

          Thanks Ray.  Appreciate the advice!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Ray-pp
            Ray-pp last edited by

            It's great that you've identified issues like this. I also suggest that if you know certain parameters are generated often and not necessary to index, that you go into your Google Webmaster Tools account > Crawl > URL Parameters and proactively set the crawl rate to 'No URLs' is appropriate. I do this with certain custom parameters for sites that are prone to having these extra URLs indexed mistakenly.

            friendoffood 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • friendoffood
              friendoffood @Ray-pp last edited by

              Hi Ray-pp,

              Thanks for your answer.  I'm not getting anything significant, but occasionally a bot will come with extra stuff added to the parameter names, so it got me to thinking a malicious program or nasty competitor might want to do that to cause havoc.  My understanding is that 404s don't hurt SEO ranking from Google, but I was thinking that the way things are set up now no-one would get a 404 and in fact Google would index the 'bad' pages, so maybe I needed to do something proactively to 404 or 301 such pages so they would never get put into an index at all.

              Since my site has lots of dynamically generated pages, I've had my share of surprises, and am just trying to avoid any new ones!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Ray-pp
                Ray-pp last edited by

                Hi Theodore - You pose an interesting problem, are you currently experiencing this issue? I don't see why someone would create a bunch of random non-existent links to your site, but if they did (and the pages were receiving low quality traffic) then I would proactively disavow those domains that created the links. That would be enough to prevent any penalties you're afraid of receiving.

                If, however, you're noticing that specific 404 pages are receiving quality traffic (maybe an old page was removed but good traffic is still sent to the page) then you would want to 301 that page to its closest relative page that deserves the traffic and authority.

                Does that help? Maybe a little more information around you specific problem would allow me to tailor the advice better.

                friendoffood 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                Browse Questions

                Explore more categories

                • Moz Tools

                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                • SEO Tactics

                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                • Community

                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                • Digital Marketing

                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                • Research & Trends

                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                • Support

                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Fubra

                  410 or 301 after URL update?

                  Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
                  0
                • dsbud

                  How important is the file extension in the URL for images?

                  I know that descriptive image file names are important for SEO. But how important is it to include .png, .jpg, .gif (or whatever file extension) in the url path? i.e. https://example.com/images/golden-retriever vs. https://example.com/images/golden-retriever.jpg Furthermore, since you can set the filename in the Content-Disposition response header, is there any need to include the descriptive filename in the URL path? Since I'm pulling most of our images from a database, it'd be much simpler to not care about simulating a filename, and just reference an image id in my templates. Example: 1. Browser requests GET /images/123456
                  2. Server responds with image setting both Content-Disposition, and Link (canonical) headers Content-Disposition: inline; filename="golden-retriever"
                  Link: <https: 123456="" example.com="" images="">; rel="canonical"</https:>

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud
                  1
                • McTaggart

                  Are these URL hashtags an SEO issue?

                  Hi guys - I'm looking at a website which uses hashtags to reveal the relevant content So there's page intro text which stays the same... then you can click a button and the text below that changes So this is www.blablabla.com/packages is the main page - and www.blablabla.com/packages#firstpackage reveals first package text on this page - www.blablabla.com/packages#secondpackage reveals second package text on this same page - and so on. What's the best way to deal with this? My understanding is the URLs after # will not be indexed very easily/atall by Google - what is best practice in this situation?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
                  0
                • TheEspresseo

                  Why is this SERP displaying an incorrect URL for my homepage?

                  The full URL of a particular site's homepage is something like http://www.example.com/directory/.
                  The canonical and og URLs match.
                  The root domain 301 redirects to it using the absolute path. And yet the SERP (and the cached version of the page) lists it simply as http://www.example.com/. What gives? Could the problem be found at some deeper technical level (.htaccess or DirectoryIndex or something?) We fiddled with things a bit this week, and while our most recent changes appear to have been crawled (and cached), I am wondering whether I should give it some more time before I proceed as if the SERP won't ever reflect the correct URL. If so, how long? [EDIT: From the comments, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QKIweOzH4#t=2838]

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
                  0
                • andypatalak

                  Mobile website on a different URL address?

                  My client has an old eCommerce website that is ranking high in Google. The website is not responsive for mobile devices. The client wants to create a responsive design mobile version of the website and put it on a different URL address. There would be a link on the current page pointing to the external mobile website. Is this approach ok or not? The reason why the client does not want to change the design of the current website is because he does not have the budget to do so and there are a lot of pages that would need to be moved to the new design. Any advice would be appreciated.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak
                  0
                • llamb

                  Using Canonical URL to poin to an external page

                  I was wondering if I can use a canonical URL that points to a page residing on external site? So a page like:
                  www.site1.com/whatever.html will have a canonical link in its header to www.site2.com/whatever.html. Thanks.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | llamb
                  0
                • salvyy

                  Exact keyword URL or not?

                  Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy
                  0
                • AndreVanKets

                  Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?

                  Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
                  oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
                  oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
                  oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
                  oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
                  oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
                  oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
                  oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
                  oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
                  1

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.