You saw it first on .TV
Whilst checking my sites through the Google Webmaster tools today I discovered that some duplicate content was being reported on two pages for Meta Descriptions and Title Tags.
On closer inspection it was actually the same page but Google had a listing for it that included a variable string that was nothing to do with me.
Original page link
http://www.nursing-agencies-list.com/email_arch4.asp
New link
http://www.nursing-agencies-list.com/email_arch4.asp?ref=Guzels.tv
This was obviously an attempt by someone to mess with my sites listings in Google or to promote information about another site. I checked for the link in Google using
link:www.nursing-agencies-list.com/email_arch4.asp?ref=Guzels.tv
but as expected got no results
Then I searched for “?ref=Guzels.tv” and got 1,460,000 results!
How and why and what could be done by Google?
- It would appear likely that there would have been a number of pages on a temporary website that listed the urls with the additional query string “?ref=Guzels.tv”
- It seems obvious that his is an orchestrated campaign to create a presence for Guzels.tv
- I am somewhat surprised that this seemingly obvious technic is not already captured by Googles algorithms and if not I would suggest that this should be looked at ASAP. In the meantime it would also make sense to find someway of removing the majority of the 1,460,000 results
Quick fix
I used VBScript to check for the variable and then perform a 301 redirect to the page without the variable
Dim NewRef
NewRef = Request.QueryString(“ref”)
If NewRef <> “” Then
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.nursing-agencies-list.com/email_arch4.asp”
Else
End If
