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.
Strange URLs, how do I fix this?
-
I've just check Majestic and have seen around 50 links coming from one of my other sites. The links all look like this:
http://www.dwww.mysite.com
http://www.eee.mysite.com
http://www.w.mysite.comThe site these links are coming from is a html site.
Any ideas whats going on or a way to get rid of these urls?
When I visit the strange URLs such as http://www.dwww.mysite.com, it shows the home page of http://www.mysite.com. Is there a way to redirect anything like this back to the home page?
-
I'm not an expert here, but it sounds like your server is configured to resolve wildcard subdomains.
Unfortunately, I'm not nearly technical enough to even begin to tell you how to solve it. This is generally configured in your hosting account cpanel, with a subdomain set to *. ( I believe there may be an .htaccess element to it as well.) Since there are so many different server configurations, my best advice would be to consult your hosting company and seek their advice.
Otherwise, proper absolute canonicals (with full URLs) on every page should act as a backup safety solution.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated.
Yes understood, I shouldnt be worried about these strange link urls.
But I am now concerned about the behavior of my site in the way when you type in say http://www.dwww.mysite.com, it doesn't give you a 404 or missing page, it shows the home page.
Ive checked my other sites and added characters after the www. and most either redirect to home page or show a page not found.
Any ideas why this isnt happening on this site? Is it the htaccess?
-
Hi John,
You hit the nail on the head when you asked - "What's going on?"
My big question is: do these links actually exist? You said they are coming from one of your other sites, so can you actually visit those pages and find the links?
If you can't, and if other reporting tools don't show those links, then it's possible it's a fluke with the Majestic crawlers. Almost all crawlers (including SEOmoz and even Google) sometimes have trouble parsing javascript or other pieces of code on a site and create phantom links and URLs. Usually these get sorted out and are of little consequence, but occasionally a few slip into reports.
I highly suspect something like that is going on in this situation. I would check both Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to see if they show these links. Most likely you have nothing to worry about.
Also, since these links don't appear to come from real pages, there's no value in redirecting them.
Let me know what you find. If these are indeed real links worthy of saving, then we can start to discuss redirecting them.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Now there are over 500 links coming from strange URLS
Really need some help
-
Any body any ideas?
Having no luck at all
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
Sanity Check: NoIndexing a Boatload of URLs
Hi, I'm working with a Shopify site that has about 10x more URLs in Google's index than it really ought to. This equals thousands of urls bloating the index. Shopify makes it super easy to make endless new collections of products, where none of the new collections has any new content... just a new mix of products. Over time, this makes for a ton of duplicate content. My response, aside from making other new/unique content, is to select some choice collections with KW/topic opportunities in organic and add unique content to those pages. At the same time, noindexing the other 90% of excess collections pages. The thing is there's evidently no method that I could find of just uploading a list of urls to Shopify to tag noindex. And, it's too time consuming to do this one url at a time, so I wrote a little script to add a noindex tag (not nofollow) to pages that share various identical title tags, since many of them do. This saves some time, but I have to be careful to not inadvertently noindex a page I want to keep. Here are my questions: Is this what you would do? To me it seems a little crazy that I have to do this by title tag, although faster than one at a time. Would you follow it up with a deindex request (one url at a time) with Google or just let Google figure it out over time? Are there any potential negative side effects from noindexing 90% of what Google is already aware of? Any additional ideas? Thanks! Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Link juice through URL parameters
Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Inactive Products - Inactive URLs
Hi, In our website www.viatrading.com we have many products that might be in stock or not depending on availability. Until now, when a product was not available anymore, we took this page down (and redirected to its product category page). And, only if the product was available again, we re-activated the URL - this might be days, months or even years later. To make this more SEO-friendly, we decided now that while a product is not available, instead or deactivating/redirecting the page, we will leave it online and just add a message saying "This product is currently not available". If we do this, we will automatically re-activate about 500 products pages at once. 1. Just to make sure, is it harmful for SEO to keep activating/deactivating URLs this way? 2. Since most of these pages have been deindexed for a long time due to being redirected - have they lost all their SEO juice? 3. How can we better activate these old 500 pages - is it ok activating them all at once? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading11 -
Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood1 -
Product or Shop in URL
What do you think is better for seo and for sale, I am using woo-ecommerce for health products website. websitename.com/product/keyword OR websitename.com/shop/keyword
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
How to fix issues regarding URL parameters?
Today, I was reading help article for URL parameters by Google. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1235687 I come to know that, Google is giving value to URLs which ave parameters that change or determine the content of a page. There are too many pages in my website with similar value for Name, Price and Number of product. But, I have restricted all pages by Robots.txt with following syntax. URLs:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=name
http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=price
http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100 Syntax in Robots.txt
Disallow: /?dir=
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*?limit= Now, I am confuse. Which is best solution to get maximum benefits in SEO?0