Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?

[friendoffood]

It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website:

www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123

www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456

etc..

How is this normally handled?  Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors.

I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.

[Ray-pp]

Hi Theodore - You pose an interesting problem, are you currently experiencing this issue? I don't see why someone would create a bunch of random non-existent links to your site, but if they did (and the pages were receiving low quality traffic) then I would proactively disavow those domains that created the links. That would be enough to prevent any penalties you're afraid of receiving.

If, however, you're noticing that specific 404 pages are receiving quality traffic (maybe an old page was removed but good traffic is still sent to the page) then you would want to 301 that page to its closest relative page that deserves the traffic and authority.

Does that help? Maybe a little more information around you specific problem would allow me to tailor the advice better.

[friendoffood]

Hi Ray-pp,

Thanks for your answer.  I'm not getting anything significant, but occasionally a bot will come with extra stuff added to the parameter names, so it got me to thinking a malicious program or nasty competitor might want to do that to cause havoc.  My understanding is that 404s don't hurt SEO ranking from Google, but I was thinking that the way things are set up now no-one would get a 404 and in fact Google would index the 'bad' pages, so maybe I needed to do something proactively to 404 or 301 such pages so they would never get put into an index at all.

Since my site has lots of dynamically generated pages, I've had my share of surprises, and am just trying to avoid any new ones!

[Ray-pp]

It's great that you've identified issues like this. I also suggest that if you know certain parameters are generated often and not necessary to index, that you go into your Google Webmaster Tools account > Crawl > URL Parameters and proactively set the crawl rate to 'No URLs' is appropriate. I do this with certain custom parameters for sites that are prone to having these extra URLs indexed mistakenly.

[friendoffood]

Thanks Ray.  Appreciate the advice!

[lfrazer]

Hello,

I am also having this issue with hundreds of dummy urls that never existed as a part of our website's blog. Do I go into parameters and specify each of the dummy urls to avoid this?

Thanks in advance for any help!!!! (and sorry to piggyback this question Theodore-hope you don't mind!)