Hello Support,

We are having a peculiar issue.

There are a lot of products and categories on the site and we have a web.config file that redirects and rewrites the pages as per the category or product. All works good like when the page url for the category or the products is right , but when we add "anything" after the URL it does not give a page error or 404 not found, but it shows the last good page from the url.


for example:


https://www.sleeprestfully.com/Philips-Respironics-DreamStation-2-Auto-CPAP-Advanced//2w57w45uwas4jn

it still opens. And it should go to a 404 page. The problem persists on all of these type of pages.

Another example:

https://www.sleeprestfully.com/Inogen-One-G4-Portable-Oxygen-Concentrator/

can open with everything you write again after the "/"

https://www.sleeprestfully.com/Inogen-One-G4-Portable-Oxygen-Concentrator/aetgashgwasegh

Any help here please as it is affecting our page ranking and SEO

Hi Charles, I am guessing your rewrite is basically treating anything after the last slash like a querystring.
Basically the following two urls will render the same page if the querystring is meaningless.

www.somesite.com/somepage.asp?thisissome=querysting
www.somesite.com/somepage.asp?thisissome=otherquerysting

Both will just render this page www.somesite.com/somepage.asp and if the querstring is meaningless, you just get the same page for both...

Another example is like this www.somesite.com/somepage.asp?thisissome=querystring&this-is-some=meaningless-querystring

So the first keyed pair (thisissome=querystring) is valid and the second (this-is-some=meaningless-querystring) is just added junk, you get the www.somesite.com/somepage.asp?thisissome=querystring page with no 404 error.

I suspect this is basically what's happening.
The bigger issue though, is were are these URL's with the added junk coming from, causing S/E's to index them (affecting your page ranking and SEO)?

Thanks,
David

The Junk URL is not created anywhere on the system. It just appears fur somewhere

May be, there's a string that's missing somewhere that activates this junk. It creates URL's that get indexed and then they disappear but new ones are created after that.

The random URL's that the platform creates are an issue that is there for a long time. We have updated the platform numerous times but they still come out. It's getting worse as we make more changes to the website.

Pls can you guide us on what to do in this situation.

When you navigate around the site, are you able to see these extra characters being added yourself?
Have you checked google search console to see if it shows here these URL's are linked from?

Thanks,
David