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On my site I use CodeIgniter, which does not allow any use of query strings. Any unacceptable characters in a URL result in a 400 error.

In Google Webmaster Tools I'm seeing several crawl errors where the page is shown as example.com/asd?pagewanted=all. Does anyone know where this query string comes from? Is it from another website, search engine or software?

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  • I don't know but a quick Google search shows lots of unrelated URLs showing the same parameter in the URL and the page title.Weird.
    – John Conde
    Mar 9, 2011 at 15:14

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I noticed nytimes uses this url parameter to display the entire article. Maybe other CMSs use this same parameter. It would make sense bloggers and Web editors would use Urls with the pagewanted parameter to link to the full article.

This returns the article in parts: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/world/africa/30libya.html

This returns the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/world/africa/30libya.html?pagewanted=all

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  • I guess that explains the parameter, though it doesn't really explain why someone is linking to my site with that parameter... Mar 30, 2011 at 10:17
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I am going to guess that its someone looking for a site exploit. pagewanted is a common variable name that is sometimes then put in a sql statement like this: http://www.codingforums.com/archive/index.php/t-97885.html

If this actually works, then they might figure that your site has some security holes.

That would also explain why a search for that would bring up a bunch of hacked websites.

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