What Is Your Google IQ?

[quick]

I am not so bright so I need the smart Google IQ people to help me.

When I search Google for my website I notice the link that comes up when showing page info in formatted like this:

http://www.buy-foreclosures-expertly.com/?tb

Could someone tell why the url comes up the backslash question mark tb? Should I be concerned?

Thanks for your help.

garth

[rockynate]

I'll take a quick stab at it.

I use question marks at the end of urls to track visitors from various sources.

Are you using a pay-per-click like Overture, or other specific advertisers for your site? They can add tracking functions to your url. The question is: how did Googlebot come across the url with the ?tb...

Perhaps there is a source out there that has a link to the site with the ?tb added. The page shows no backlinks... but Google is having a bit of a tizzy right now, so who knows if there are backlinks to the page or not.

Just a thought...

[Alan Perkins]

Yes, it's a link on this page:

http://www.ablake.net/successforums/domain/49.html

[quick]

Alan, Rockynate thanks for your answers.

First of all I did not submit that url that
Alan found on the Blake site to Google.

I am not using any Pay per Clicks and I did not
have any backlinks before the Google dance this month.


My logs show that Google listed my index page on 5/26 but the index has not been spidered since 1/7/2003. The last time I submitted this page was 4/29/2003.

[rockynate]

Alan is right.

You don't have to submit the page to have it included in Google. If there's a link to you on any page that's spidered, the spider will follow it and include the data.

In fact, I haven't submitted a site to Google since last year, but new pages and sites that I create and link to are usually in the Google index within a week or two.

So that page that Alan mentions is the reason for the funny listing in the index.

[polarmate]

So it is. Pretty much like how Google decided in Jan of this year to award my domain with an affiliate URL. The most probable 'reason' was that the page on which the affiliate URL was found was of higher PR than my own, so Google resolved my domain name to the affiliate URL.

Luckily for me, the affiliate from whose web site they picked it up had it formulated all wrong. We fixed the URL on the affiliate web site and come Feb, our domain was given its own URL back, sans the affiliate and banner id.

But as fate would have it, Google decided to revert to Jan's index to play with the latest algo changes, and we're back with the darned affiliate URL as our URL even though it does not exist ANYWHERE on the Internet. Luckily, we've dropped the affiliate who moved to per month banner fees rather than commissions and no-one gets commissions for the clicks that come from Google - that is, if anyone can find our site on page 4 for our main keyword!! Thank God for PPC and all our other affiliates!!

[Bernard]

Polarmate,

Out of curiosity, do you use any absolute URLs within the HTML of your site? The reason I ask is because it is my undertsanding that Google will adopt the domain/URL for a site that is referenced in an absolute link within the site when there are multiple URLs resolving to the same site. At least, it appears to be the case when multiple domains map to the same IP. I wonder if it works the same way with affiliate URLs....

[polarmate]

Bernard,
The only absolute URL I use on my site is the one pointing to the root and of course, those pointing to other sites. This was based on the advice I got in this forum. So any link that points to the homepage is always formulated as:
http://www.mydomain.com/

We don't have multiple domains mapping to our IP. Just the one. Our URL in Google now looks like:
http://www.mydomain.com/?AID=9999&BID=9999

The affiliate had a PR7 for the page on which this URL was placed in December. At that time my home page had PR5. So this was explained as the 'logical' reason for Google to award us that URL.

[Bernard]

OK. I wonder if this would have occurred if you had had an absolute reference like:

http://www.mydomain.com/links.html

Google obviously does some URL resolution processing for the case of multiple domains. Strange that they wouldn't do the same for affiliate URLs....