How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?

[JohnPeters]

I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it.

Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik:

mysite.com/?674764

mysite.com/?rtf8y78

I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page.

Any ideas?

[DukeTanson]

It depends on the type of system you used to create your website. Speak to your developers and they can create a rule in your htaccess file that will redirect all urls with /?.

Before you do that  you need to establish why you want to redirect them and how those urls were created in the first place. understanding how they came about might unearth a cms related issue which can be better address with canonical, webmaster tools url paremeters or other techniques of avoiding duplicate content.

[JohnPeters]

The URLs have been indexed by Google from an old site.

The new site is now a Wordpress site.

To tidy up what Google has indexed I want to redirect these /? URLs to the home page.

I have tried the "link juice keeper" plugin but that did not work.

I really need to know what code I need to put in the htaccess file to do this. i have tried a whole bunch of things but cant get it to work

[DukeTanson]

Are these urls currently leading to a 404 page? if they are then  follow these steps

1. Download the list from Google webmaster tools, use "text to columns" in excel to break the url up so you have "/?xxxx" in one column.
2. Install http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/ and go through all the right setup
3. click on "edit files" submenu and add this rule Redirect 301  /?xxxx   http://www.homepage.com (where /?xxx is the url you want to redirect and "hompage" is the correct url of your homepage.

Hope this helps

[JohnPeters]

No the URLs just show the home page and not a 404

There are hundreds of them, so would  it not be easier to make a 301 rule in the htaccess that redirects all urls that have /? in, rather then manually redirecting each URL?

[DukeTanson]

Ok. have a look at the page source and see what canonical is shows. if its pointing to  the current homepage then leave it for a while. Google will catch up with and remove it from the index. if not the post a full url here so i can take a look for you.

[JohnPeters]

Hi Duke, appreciate your help.

The URLs such as mysite.com/?674764 dont have a page. When you visit the URL it just shows the home page.

Ive just looked at another Wordpress site and added this /? in the URL, again it shows the home page without redirecting the URL

See here: http://yoast.com/?

Infact you can enter anything after the /? and it will still show the home page

[DukeTanson]

It looks like you might not have anything to worry about then. pick an example of that url with ?zxxxxx. look at the page source (in firefox, go to tools, web developer, then page source) look for "rel=canonical". if the url indicated there is your homepage then you have nothing to worry about. after a few crawls, Google will know that the url is the same as the home and will remove those urls from the index.

[JohnPeters]

Just looked at the code and yes it does have rel=canonical

I had no idea that this would tell google its the same as the home page

Thanks for helping, really appreciate it.