Please help!

I'm afraid that I've goofed up with Google and need some advise on how to correct the situation.

My site, which is over 8 years old and is listed within Yahoo, DMOZ, Google directory, etc. has always positioned very well for relevant search terms, with many of the links pointing directly to the site's home page.

I was checking a few keywords this morning and noticed that our home page was no longer displaying within any SERPS, despite the page continuing to reflect a high PR and other pages within the site continuing to display. After performing a search for an exact phrase from the home page, I noticed that Google has indexed an affiliate link (something like www.site.com/?aff_id) and appears to have replaced www.site.com/ in the index with www.site.com/?aff_id.

The site has many inbound links from large sites (www.microsoft.com, www.macromedia.com, www.ups.com, www.verisign.com) that all point to www.site.com/ , however it appears that the one link on the affiliate site that points to www.site.com/?aff_id has put me in a pickle.

I know that you can request Google to remove a page from their index, however I'm afraid that a request to remove www.site.com/?aff_id might somehow be misinterpreted as a request to remove our site's actual home page from the index.

I'll abandon the affiliate link immediately (in fact, it has already been removed from the linking site) just to get my standard results back.

Does anyone have any advice for someone who is feeling like quite the moron right now?

Thanks!

Doug

I have successfully removed domain.com?Id=text from Google with no problems. Just be EXTREMELY careful; only leave those urls you want gone on the robots.txt. You should email Google first though (especially if you site is white hat), to let them know, and they might do it for you.

This should not have happened.

Please help!

I'm afraid that I've goofed up with Google and need some advise on how to correct the situation.

My site, which is over 8 years old and is listed within Yahoo, DMOZ, Google directory, etc. has always positioned very well for relevant search terms, with many of the links pointing directly to the site's home page.

I was checking a few keywords this morning and noticed that our home page was no longer displaying within any SERPS, despite the page continuing to reflect a high PR and other pages within the site continuing to display. After performing a search for an exact phrase from the home page, I noticed that Google has indexed an affiliate link (something like www.site.com/?aff_id) and appears to have replaced www.site.com/ in the index with www.site.com/?aff_id.

The site has many inbound links from large sites (www.microsoft.com, www.macromedia.com, www.ups.com, www.verisign.com) that all point to www.site.com/ , however it appears that the one link on the affiliate site that points to www.site.com/?aff_id has put me in a pickle.

I know that you can request Google to remove a page from their index, however I'm afraid that a request to remove www.site.com/?aff_id might somehow be misinterpreted as a request to remove our site's actual home page from the index.

I'll abandon the affiliate link immediately (in fact, it has already been removed from the linking site) just to get my standard results back.

Does anyone have any advice for someone who is feeling like quite the moron right now?

Thanks!

Doug

You should always set up 301 redirects for bots requesting any url with an affiliate id attached. That will make sure that you never end up in a situation where a search engine screws up and lists an affiliates url in its database.

I've added the /?aff_id to my robots.txt, set up a 301 permenant redirect via an .htaccess file, and submitted a "reinclusion" request via Google's web form, but alas... nothing yet.

The Google bot has visited after me adding the tools above, yet my actual home page is still not being indexed and the affiliate link continues to be listed.

Any ideas?!?

Doug

Just an update in case anyone else runs into this problem.

We made sure that the site containing the link changed the link to point to just www.site.com/. We set up an Apache mod rewrite rule that forced the user to www.site.com/ and returned a 301 error when attempting to access www.site.com/?aff_id. We also added /?aff_id to our robots.txt.

Never heard back from Google regarding our inquiry, however fortunately we're back in results after roughly a week.

Just wondering if in robots.txt you added /?aff_id or the full URL www.yoursite.com/?aff_id. Because in your initial post you were concerned about your site's actual home page being removed from the index.

Thanks :)

Just wondering if in robots.txt you added /?aff_id or the full URL (url)www.yoursite.com/?aff_id(/url). Because in your initial post you were concerned about your site's actual home page being removed from the index.

We included only "/?aff_id" after doing a fair amount of research that made us comfortable that the major bots would handle this without any fear of it effecting just "/".

Terrific :D Many thanks for your reply.

One more question. Did you add the specific affiliate (e.g., /?aff_id=1234), or just /?aff_id which I assume would exclude all affilites?

Thanks again.

One more question. Did you add the specific affiliate (e.g., /?aff_id=1234), or just /?aff_id which I assume would exclude all affilites?


Just the one specific affiliate id (e.g. /?12345), although in our case, this was the only affiliate that was utilizing this service. I think the end result of this experience is that I will always and forever use some sort of redirect script that makes it obvious to the bots that the content is still be delivered by my home page.