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Radia820

: Google attempting crawl of URLs with parameter randomly placed in URL We have a weird SEO issue; In Google Webmaster Tools we are seeing a huge spike in Not Found Server Errors. There are

@Radia820

Posted in: #Google #Googlebot #GoogleSearchConsole #Seo #UrlParameters

We have a weird SEO issue;

In Google Webmaster Tools we are seeing a huge spike in Not Found Server Errors.

There are a set of several hundred dynamic pages which we need to maintain (though not have indexed) that look like this;
site.com/en-GB/Pages/job-details.aspx?job-id=123


But weirdly Google is generating thousands of 404 crawl errors trying to index URLs with this structure;
site.com/en-GB/Pages/job-id?/en-GB/Pages/job-details.aspx?job-id=172649


There are no;


Internal links pointing to this or similar
External links that we can find pointing to this or similar
Errors in the sitemap.xml


In a possibly related development; the URL Parameters section of Webmaster Tools, it’s listing some really weird parameters like; /en-GB/pages/job-details.aspx Which clearly is actually a chunk of the URL.

We have tried excluding this and the ‘job-id’ parameter from Google by choosing
Edit > Yes > No URLs Thought to no avail!

My questions are:


Why would Google add a parameter mid-way through the URL and how do we stop it?
Why would Google think that a chunk of the URL was a parameter and how do we stop it?


I’m pretty stuck on this, so your help is much appreciated!

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@Si4351233

Answering this as maybe it will help someone in future.

Basically we appear to have inadvertently added code that renders different markup conditionally on the user-agent (or 'cloaking' to it's friends). There are add-ons for Chrome and Firefox that allow you test this

The version of the page rendered for;

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)


Contains the offending links.

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