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Thanks for the great replies all.  Just to clarify, this is the page we're referencing:

http://www.knackhq.com/business-directory-user-demo/?escaped_fragment=

You can see the one pagination var "next" that points here:

http://www.knackhq.com/business-directory-user-demo/?escaped_fragment=home/?view_3_page=2

As you can see this is pretty simple.  There's only one potential variable (the "prev" and "next" links) for introducing these huge numbers and that's pretty limited.  We tested the Google URLs up and down the app and haven't seen anything that would send it fishing for larger numbers.  But Google keeps hammering us with:

GET /business-directory-user-demo/?escaped_fragment=home/?view_3_page=1000251

For now we're trying to respond to those with 404s and hope they eventually die.

Unfortunately we can't avoid hashbangs.

Awesome, thanks for looking into it.  We've gotten nowhere with any kind of answer.

Hi Federico, thanks for the response.

Unfortunately this is an SEO solution for a third-party JavaScript product, so removing the hash isn't an option.

I'm still interested in knowing if this is a formal Google practice and if there's some way to control or mitigate this.

We're using the Google snapshot method to index dynamic Ajax content.  Some of this content is from tables using pagination. The pagination is tracked with a var in the hash, something like:

#!home/?view_3_page=1

We're seeing all sorts of calls from Google now with huge numbers for these URL variables that we are not generating with our snapshots.  Like this:

#!home/?view_3_page=10099089

These aren't trivial since each snapshot represents a server load, so we'd like these vars to only represent what's returned by the snapshots.

Is Google generating random numbers going fishing for content?  If so, is this something we can control or minimize?

Thanks, that most recent answer helped and confirmed our suspicions.  There is in fact a different website for each domain.  We will leave the old site in place for the time being and just link folks to the new one from there.  Thanks again and sorry about any confusion.

Sorry for any confusion.  The new domain (knackhq.com) is the one that doesn't rank as well.  The old one (appnowgo.com) does rank pretty well for many of our keywords.  This is why we are still getting 60%+ of our converts through that site.  So, while I know we will have to 301 that domain eventually, we are apprehensive about doing it now if we stand to loose a large amount of that convertible traffic.  We are still focusing efforts on the knackhq.com domain but just want to know if we should wait until that domain ranks better before redirecting the old domain, or just switch now.

We are getting about 60% of our converted traffic by way of the old domain.  How much dropoff should we expect when we do the redirect.  I'm assuming that all of the result pages for the old domain will just go away instead of adapt to the new domain, right?

We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com.  We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com.  The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting.   For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords.  Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name.

The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com?   Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com?  We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible.

Thanks!

Eric