Are personalized URLs a danger to my Search Engine inclusion?

Posted by John on October 2, 2005, 8:11 am

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Greetings, all,

Several days after adding personalized URLs to my "amazing" collection
of "God Loves (yourname)" mazes, it occurred to me that if someone were
to create an offcolor term, then copy the URL to his own web page, that
I might be penalized because my page would include that text on the
resulting page.

For example, let's say that "GOD LOVES JOKES" has negative
connotations. Someone could create:

http://mazes.com/asp-maze/godloves.asp?firstname=jokes

and visiting the page reveals a headline "God Loves Jokes".

Could I hurt my search engine rankings by giving people the ability to
create a personalized URL like this? Of course, what's the likelihood
that someone would abuse such a link?

The next related question would be: Is there a metatag or the
equivalent that I could put on a page that is reached with a
personalized URL telling the search engines to ignore this page in
their searches? I could always add logic to add that code to any page
source code that was reached with a personalized URL from another page.

Which brings up yet another question? Can I, in my ASP program, tell
what page contained the link that the person just visited?

John

P.S. I've also added an ENLARGE button, a SHRINK button, and a
PRINTABLE button that merely hides the information above the maze so
that it will be the topmost/leftmost item on the page when you print.

Posted by Philip Ronan on October 2, 2005, 5:54 pm

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"John" wrote:

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You can easily stop this by fixing your asp script to respond to POST data
only. If you detect a GET request, just send out a default name or a welcome
page. This will also solve the search engine indexing problem (their robots
don't send POST data, so they'll never see the results). You should read up
on META robots tags anyway, since you'll probably find them useful:

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--
phil [dot] ronan @ virgin [dot] net
http://vzone.virgin.net/phil.ronan/

Posted by Miguel Cruz on October 2, 2005, 9:38 pm

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Well, God does love jokes.

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You never know when someone might find it and make some sort of a joke out
of it. When that happens it could spread like wildfire.

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Maybe I am misunderstanding your question, but can't you just examine the
HTTP-Referer value?

mmiguel
--
Hit The Road! Photos from 36 countries on 5 continents: http://travel.u.nu
Latest photos: Macau; Queens Day in Amsterdam; Grand Canyon; Amman, Jordan

Posted by John on October 3, 2005, 7:14 am

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Philip wrote:
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I already use POST, but it occurred to me that an average person might
want to save their maze in their favorite places, and giving them a
personalized URL is one way to do it.

But you've reminded me that I have a third option ... if the person
puts a name into the URL, give them their maze but use default
headlines, so that I don't have to worry about search spiders seeing
the actual text, so I don't have to worry about x-rated language, etc.

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Thanks, I'll do that.

Miguel wrote:
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Well, God does love jokes.

Yes, he does, that's why I used jokes as my example.

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I think I'll change my headline so that it's a default headline when
using GET data, but is personalized with POST data.

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You're probably understanding me perfectly. I don't know how to do
that. That's why I asked my question. I'm an utter beginner at using
ASP inside my HTML.

John

Posted by John on October 3, 2005, 10:24 pm

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I wanted to thank you for your hint, Miguel, HTTP-Referer is exactly
what I was looking for. I found the information on how to use it
several places on the internet, then searched for information to let me
add unique referrers to a text file. Here's what I ended up with:

<%
'Create Our ServerVariables and Store them to a variable
site = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
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site = site & "," & thispage
dim fs,f
set fs=Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set f=fs.OpenTextFile(Server.MapPath("testread.txt"),1,true)
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testitem=f.ReadLine: if testitem=site then site=""
loop: f.Close
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set f=fs.OpenTextFile(Server.MapPath("testread.txt"),8,true)
f.WriteLine(site): f.Close: site=""
set f=Nothing: set fs=Nothing
end if
end if
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I'm sure I could make this routine above even better, but it works, so
I'm satisfied. For example, I could have used EXIT DO after site=""
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hesitated to use exit do, because on occasion, they have done funny
things in other programs.

Having found the statements required to let me create this file, I went
on to set up a similar file to keep track of first names requested, and
while making those changes, also changed it so that if someone uses the
www.mazes.com/asp-maze/godloves.asp?firstname=john style of
personalized URL, their name does not show up in the text or headings
of the page. So, once in awhile, i can glance at the names file to see
what kinds of interesting names have been a-maze-d.

John