Seo Fake backlinking from other sites

Question

The title might be a little bit confusing. Well, I noticed that someone had used a page's URL for backlinking or indexing his keywords.

This is what he did:

The normal url:

http:// .....Default.aspx

He edited the normal url to:

 http:// ..... Default.aspx?places-to-buy-wedding-dresses

So Now (what I think) the person have been making backlinks for the edited url. So when I search for the actual site. Then the edited url shows up in google. (also the normal url, with a description of the edited url.)

So the edited url doesn't actually exist. It's just created as Default.aspx?..

Any explanations? This didn't happened to my site, just noticed it in another site. How can I do avoid this happening to my site?

Answer 1

This is a good reason to put a canonical tag in each of your pages. If http://example.com/Default.aspx has a canonical tag like <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/Default.aspx"/>then when somebody links to http://example.com/Default.aspx?places-to-buy-wedding-dresses it will also have that canonical url. Googlebot will see the canonical, and only index the page without the extra parameter.

Answer 2

You cant physically stop people back linking to you using made up variables such as ?string, and #strings but you can rewrite these requests using 301's.

ASP.NET Site

If you don't have NUGET already I suggest you get as it contains lots of packages that you can explore and solve little questions like this with.

Using NUGET you can get ASP.NET Friendly URLS which will remove default.asp?strings or search for rewriting solutions that can remove pages that don't actually exist with a redirecting 404 page.

Apache Site

If you just linked an example that happens to be ASPX based then you will need a different solution for apache which is more likely to be your hosting if you don't use aspx. You need to use mod_rewrite and use the htaccess to remove strings using conditional rewrites.