Invalid PHP pages creating duplicate content

[treborito]

My client's restaurant site has been hit hard by the bourbon update and has yet to return to the very high rankings that it's had for the past five years. We were number one on Google for several different key phrases pertaining to Philadelphia Restaurants. We still hold the top positions for the same phrases on MSN and Yahoo. Google crawls our home page every day but only crawls the rest of the site on a monthly basis as the site content does not change that often. I've already submitted a reinclusion request to Google but have yet to hear back. Not sure if it was necessary since we're still in the index.

I've added a permanent 301 redirect, absolute links, removed all duplicate content. As I was reviewing the site, I discovered a few things that seem quite strange:

1. Google indexed back in January, some pages that do not exist on my site' server but are still live. eg. http://www.lafamiglia.com/Awards.htm...35fb95b2021529 and a few others...My fear is, that these bogus dynamic URLs are being miscontrued as duplicate content. Any idea why they appear in the Google index or where they came from? I need to get rid of them...

I have only two valid PHP pages on my site that ask the user to reserve a table or send in a comment. They contain an image verifier script via a formmail.php file that I downloaded from tectite.com.

Here they are:
http://www.lafamiglia.com/Comments.php
http://www.lafamiglia.com/Reservations.php

2. I have noticed that there are countless restaurant/wine related Web site directories that have hijacked a lot of my site's content/wine list/menus, and posted on their own site (which, in turn, back link to our site). Could this duplicate content on these other Web sites be a contributing factor in my site's severe loss in page ranking?

I recently found this thread, http://www.elixirsystems.com/seo_tip...nt-penalty.php about dealing with and finding duplicate sites. I think I need to rewrite some content as there are two many sites with our hijacked content.

Thanks for any assistance.

[russellr]

Hi,

You might be best to ask Google about their search engine's errors, but I'll tell you what I can....

some pages that do not exist on my site' server but are still live. eg. http://www.lafamiglia.com/Awards.ht...235fb95b2021529 and a few others

That page is on your site. If you're referring to the ?PHPSESSID= component, that's automatically added by PHP when the user's browser doesn't support cookies.

It's for session management. Spiders don't generally support cookies, so PHP has to add this to the URL to keep track of the "user's" (spider's) session.

A good spider and search engine would not consider this to be a duplicate URL.

I have only two valid PHP pages on my site that ask the user to reserve a table or send in a comment. They contain an image verifier script via a formmail.php file that I downloaded from tectite.com.

Forms generally don't get submitted by spiders. So the spider will see the form but not proceed past that point.

I have noticed that there are countless restaurant/wine related Web site directories that have hijacked a lot of my site's content/wine list/menus, and posted on their own site (which, in turn, back link to our site). Could this duplicate content on these other Web sites be a contributing factor in my site's severe loss in page ranking?

Yes, I think that's very likely from what I've been reading about Google.

Unfortunately, this is something wrong with Google, that Google needs to fix.

The Web won't change to fit in with Google. It's Google's job to work with the reality of the Web. Duplicate content happens, validly (i.e. through no fault of the originating site). They must deal with this properly.

Another thing is that it's valid for some sites not to change much. Why should a site owner have to artificially keep changing his site just to rank properly in Google? Again a fault with Google, not the site.

A friend has written about this on his blog: http://blog.surfulater.com/wordpress/?p=20

[treborito]

Thanks for the response Russel. I think I found out what the duplicate content problem is. Prior to my adding the 301 redirect google crawled the non-www version of a 13 page wine list that I added back in February and has kept it in its index since February. I have listed the non-www URLs here with hopes that they will get crawled again and wiped out by the 301 redirect.

http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList01.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList02.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList03.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList04.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList05.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList06.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList07.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList08.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList09.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList10.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList11.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList12.html
http://lafamiglia.com/OurWineList13.html
http://lafamiglia.com/MWData.html