Hello,

In trying to implement some changes at a clients site I am now
getting some funky-do stuff in google.

When I put the 'site:' and the website that I am checking into
google's search bar some of the resulting pages at the tail end of the
listings (on page 3) have this at the end:

/?M=A
or
/?S=A
or
/?D=A
or
/?N=A

and the last two entire listings look like this:

Index of /23playIndex of /23play. Name Last modified Size
Description. Parent Directory 04-May-2007 08:12 -. Apache/1.3.37
Server at www.example.biz Port 80.
www.example.biz/23play/?D=A - 1k - Supplemental Result - Cached -
Similar pages

Index of /23playIndex of /23play. Name Last modified Size
Description. Parent Directory 28-Apr-2007 20:22 -. Apache/1.3.37
Server at www.example.biz Port 80.
www.example.biz/23play/?N=A - 1k - Supplemental Result - Cached -
Similar pages

I placed 'example' in where the actual website name should be. Some of
you will know what it is anyway. If you need to see the linstings, email
me here at JSH.

What does this mean? I have never seen this before at any of my
sites or clients sites.

Note: Only google returns these results. Yahoo, MSN, alltheweb and
altavista do not show the resulting "weird" listings.

Help please!

verb

Regarding the last two entries:

Index of /23play

I believe this is what google does when it records an empty directory,
or a directory which does not have a index.html or whatever file -
instead of the 'title' of the page, it lists the directory.

It might be the case that this directory in question -does- have a valid
index.html (or whatever) file in place at the moment, but didn't the
last time google took a look at it.

Still thinking about the first part of your question...and this answer
for the second part could be wrong...

I think I have the answer.

I have confirmed that there is no difference between the original and
/?X=X page, so I don't think a hacker is attacking that part at least.

Why is /?X=X is showing up as indexed pages, is because every directory
with publically accessable content must also have a index.html file. If
it doesn't, google will randomly pick a page and treat it as the
index.html file, it then uses the /?X=X to differentiate between the
"index" version and original version.

Verb, I believe these are 'old' entries still hanging around google; I
don't know how or when google decides to clean up such, or whether there
is a way for you as site admin to ask google to do a refresh and flush
them.

Is it possible that the "/?D=A" string was included in a link somewhere
in the html code for the site as it was being constructed? And google
indexed that link exactly as it was written, leading to the inclusion of
that (apparently useless) string in its search results?

I'm making a -ton- of guesses here, so this could all be wrong... if you
want to test the theory, maybe you could start with this page:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8459#uncache

And see if you can force google to update its index of your site, or
remove those strange entries.

>> google will randomly pick a page and treat it as the
index.html file, it then uses the /?X=X to differentiate between the
"index" version and original version

Scratch most of my last post.

Spider, did you notice that the 'cached' version of those pages shows an
empty directory? To me, this implies that google took a snapshot of
those pages 'at the wrong time' - and also suggests (?) to me that she
could get rid of those strange listings (if desired) if she could get
google to refresh its view of her site.

OK - GOT IT!

I was really weirded out over this!

Thanks so much for all your hard work looking around for answers.

You are a PAL!

Verb

massagetrade,

I think that is what happened, but I don't have any recent experiance
posting to the public internet, so I can't say for certain. All of my
recent web development has been for internal clients.

Spider,

Thanks for explaining the /?X=X thing.

Thanks guys, this was driving me nutso. I looked around in yahoo groups
yesterday and found an indexing group there and joined. If I have
further questions about indexing I have a place to go with questions
(besides google) regarding these types of issues. I posted this over at
web shoppe wonders too but with less than 10 members (so far) I got zip
over there. LOL.

I do want to make that group go and grow so if anyone has a friend who
wants to join - please don't hesitate to offer...

THANKS spider and massage. I must be getting paranoid - duh.

verb