Crazy long weird URLs... help

[JohnPeters]

I have a HTML website, mysite1.com, and I placed a link on the home page to another one of my sites, mysite2.com

Today I checked the links to mysite2.com in Majestic and noticed 24 links coming from the mysite1.com instead of just one link.

The URLs from mysite1.com that are showing in Majestic are like this

mysite1.com/?epl=4donafvFK3fMXxZXMWQRQLodmPchoXCK5C7-kbBv_agkwlkJrZAoaSDVUlhqFmUqt0f8c2Q6jF6GO6DNMnbidqRsikriF-IEBEt5okmICLEB0FxP36GrsxoPGQ3SGBo1PVR7itDUA4CYmjypn5gi

mysite1.com,was inherited from a friend and I believe that it was originally built in Frontpage.

Can you tell me how I can get rid of these multiple links as I only want 1 showing from the home page

Thanks in advance

[DeanAndrews]

Hi John

Could you provide the address so we can look please. Would be making wild guesses else.

[JohnPeters]

Hi,

Unfortunately I cant do that on a public forum.

But I can tell you all the URLs look like the one Ive posted, loads of numbers etc.

It isnt a dynamic site so these actual URLs are not  live pages.

When you visit these URLs, they are just duplicates of the home page

Hope that helps a little

[DeanAndrews]

Hi John

PM me if you like, I'll have a look for you. Promise not to repeat the domain name.

[JohnPeters]

Ok I have noticed that any URL with ? at the end shows the home page.

mysite1.com/? will show the home page

mysite1.com/?111 will show the home page

etc etc

So I guess I need to redirect anything with a ? to the home page using a 301.

Can someone tell me what the code will be to do that in the htaccess file?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

First of all, be careful with off-site links from your homepage unless there is a very good reason for it. If there isn't, I would always no-follow it so Google doesn't see an unethical link.

With reagards what you are seeing in Majestic, when you hover over the link, what do you see? Is it just a normal HTML link or has it been completed another way?

Andy

[JohnPeters]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for helping out.

Can you tell me why you think home page links are bad? I actually started a question about this last week but didnt get many replys. Do you think getting home page links a bad thing to do?

Ive done some digging and found that when I go to mysite1.com in majestic and look at Pages, its showing all the long URLs that I found pointing to mysite2.com

So I guess that at some point in its life, these pages have been indexed by Google.

These URLs all start with a ? i.e. mysite1.com/?561796

So I am guessing the best way to solve this is to make all URLs that start with a /? be redirected to the root.

Unfortunetly I have no idea how to write this in the htaccess file

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I can't really help you with the htaccess stuff John, but regarding links from the homepage to another external site, this has always been a questionable practice. Why would you want to direct someone to another site as soon as they got to your homepage? Google see this in a similar way.

However, if there is a very good reason for the link to appear there and if it formed part of a good sentence with accurate anchor text and wasn't trying to push people there just to get traffic up, then I can see no harm - bit hard to judge without seeing though.

Andy

[JohnPeters]

I see what you mean. Well the links from the home page sites are going from sites that are for information purposes only, then link to the service provider recommended by that website.

I wouldn't see anything wrong with this. There are 5 sites linking from the home page to my main site out of 120 backlinks. I presume that this doesnt look bad in Google's eyes

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I would need to see this to give you any real feedback on it John but general rule of thumb is if Google looked at these links, would they see and understand the reasoning for the links to be there?

Andy