Duplicate Content Hacking
Your blog is not safe. There is a new hack out there where a malicious user can create the illusion of duplicate content on your site - and its not hard.
Essentially all they need to do is link to a page on your site with added GET variables in the URI. If your page returns a 200 header which is in essence confirming that the page exists, then it will look like you have two unique URIs that point to the same content - duplicate content.
Currently I believe this hack only affects the MSN Live search engine which was recently released, however, if you create enough unique links pointing to the same content this hack can get the target site removed from MSN live altogether.
There is good news…
The solution for this hack has been posted at this online marketing blog. The solution redirects the user to another page on your site and returns a 301 header to show that the content has been permanently moved. I have not tried this solution yet, but I will do and I trust that it works.
This does not surprise me at all in all honesty. When I started this blog I noticed a number of (like 500) false URLs in Yahoo Site Explorer which never existed on my site and were stuffed with random keywords such as florida mortgages, online gambling etc. etc.
In fact, they are still there, but my domain is serving 404s for these pages so whats it gonna do? I figure, soon enough spiders will work out that the pages do not exist and cease retrieving them.
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[…] We also now do not have all those spammy urls listed in Yahoo site explorer, looks like the 404s took care of it for me, but you will see a few urls with random get variables tagged on the end, this is an attempt to create seemingly duplicate content on my site as I mentioned in this post about MSN duplicate content filters - I really have to plug that hole… […]