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Hey Everyone!

Perhaps someone can help me. I came across this command in the robots.txt file of our Canadian corporate domain. I looked around online but can't seem to find a definitive answer (slightly relevant).

the command line is as follows:

Disallow: /*?*

I'm guessing this might have something to do with blocking php string searches on the site?. It might also have something to do with blocking sub-domains, but the "?" mark puzzles me

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks, Rob

Thanks. It was a little of both in terms of concerns. I didn't want indexing issues, and the hyphen just threw me off -  as well as it impacting the usability of the page. As long as they hyphen will work in the sub-domain I'm good to go. I didn't want any issues later Thanks to all who replied!

this is actuallly for the sub-domain, not the primary domain.

so football.mysite.com as opposed to something like football-sport.mysite.com

It's the hyphen that's throwing me out of whack..

Ideas? and thanks for the insights~!!

Sorry - should have said "not very friendly!"

I agree. I'm still on the fence about the hyphenated sub-domain. I can't find too many sites that actually practice this technique. i'm looking for some references online.

This domain won't be spoken over the phone, and from a usability perspective, but very flashy r friendly.

I wanted to use something like say football.mysite.com instead of football-sport.mycompany.com

i'm still perplexed!! LOL

For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project.

Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com

I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past.

I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index.

Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer!

Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help!

Thanks, Rob