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IIS Flaw Causes Google duplicate content

August 3rd, 2007 ogletree

I have a new site that our company is working on. I noticed that in google all of a sudden we have all of our pages listed in Google with very weird things added to our URLs.

http://www.mysite.com/(A(XobqNFPtxwEkAAAAMzk3ZTU
4NzQtZGFjZS00OGUxLWExYzYtZDBiYjc1Mzg1N2YwP7fq1em0HKYJ5
vYMP8lm4NCf3241))/subdirectory/Default.aspx

I found out that this works on any IIS server. Even on www.microsoft.com. I have no idea what this is. I do know it is a bad thing for SEO and any site hosted on IIS needs to address this. This goes back to what I say about site architecture. Your site needs to have a URL policy set up and enforced. Nobody can go to any page unless that URL is already known to the site owner. This means no page can be access from 2 or more differnt urls. The site owner needs to redirect any rogue URL to the correct one and 404 anything you can’t predict. What this does is create duplicate content that the search engines do not like and can even hurt a sites rankings.

From my testing I found that it follows rules. (A(this-is_a-test) The capital A can be any capital letter but will not work with lower case letters. You can put that inbetween any 2 forward slashes in a URL on IIS. Here are some tests using www.microsoft.com

Works

(A(asdfa-123))

(A(asdfa-sdf))

(C(asdfasdf))

(A(asdfA_123))

Does not work

(c(asdfasdf))

(())

(Z()a)

(A(#$%))

(1(asdfasdf))

((A(asdfa-sdf)))

You can do this on any IIS website from what I can see. I even got it to work on myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/(A(asdfa-123))/Modules/Search/Pages/Search.
aspx?t=208,&q=related:www.microsoft.com/default.aspx

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  1. Eliena Andrews
    August 9th, 2007 at 10:30 | #1
    Reply | Quote

    i guess microsoft is scared of this flaw, have you reported this to Bill Gates ?

    Eliena Andrews

  2. SEOContest2008
    February 1st, 2008 at 08:41 | #2
    Reply | Quote

    Has this been patched yet please?

    IIS

  3. SEOContest2008
    February 1st, 2008 at 09:05 | #3
    Reply | Quote

    Wow!
    I just tried it on several sites and it works!!! Unbelievable flaw for IIS sites.
    I can imagine it will be a big problem for some sites if unscrupulous webmasters decide to spam the web with these dupe links to lose their competitors SERPS….

  4. Custom Software Consulting
    February 27th, 2008 at 12:52 | #4
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    Yes, bill gates should know about this immediately!

  5. Horsham Web Designer
    December 14th, 2008 at 08:47 | #5
    Reply | Quote

    IIS not working right? Shocking! I’ll be sticking with Apache all the way!

  6. Tyler – Accommodation Geneva
    March 13th, 2009 at 07:22 | #6
    Reply | Quote

    Hmmm… very interesting discovery you’ve done… Personnaly I have never noticed it before you said… Just now I googled and found out that it is really so!!! Strange… Nice that you’ve found some explanations to it…

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