Strange things showing up

[Sarve]

I saw these strings,?C=D;O=A, ?C=D;O=D attached to the end of a link, in my stats this morning. When I made my site map last week, the site map creator kept coming up with links that had those characters attached to the end. I deleted them all before submitting my site map, but someone still landed on it. A link with those characters will take someone to the directory that the page is in. Instead of having the index file come up, they see the whole directory. What is causing this? Any ideas?

Let me add one more thing. The person who landed on those pages was a charter.com user. I don't know if that makes a difference or not. I'm using charter. net.

[Sarve]

Oh I take part of that back. I just tried clicking on those links again and the correct page showed up. However those characters still should not be at the end of a link. I don't know how they got there or what they mean.

[jonra01]

Everything after the ? is part of the query string. This is frequently used when you have dynamic pages. It is one way to pass variables from one page to another. I use the same technique on my sites.

Look at this page - http://www.jonra.com/poetry.html?p=29 The ?p=29 tells the script which poem to display. If I categorized the poems the query string might look like this ?c=2&p=29 where c stands for category. If I ran the whole site from a single index.php page then it might look like this ?s=poems&c=2&p=29 That would break down to this 's' = subject, 'c' = category, 'p' = poem id.

If your site is based on PHP then you should not have deleted those from the links in the sitemap. You should resubmit the site map with the proper links.

[Sarve]

Everything after the ? is part of the query string. This is frequently used when you have dynamic pages. It is one way to pass variables from one page to another. I use the same technique on my sites.

If your site is based on PHP then you should not have deleted those from the links in the sitemap. You should resubmit the site map with the proper links.

At the risk of showing my ignorance, I've never understood what PHP is and since I don't understand it, my site is probably not based on it unless by accident.;-) The little bit I just read about it doesn't sound like anything on my site. Everything on my site is htm, html, and jpg. Any linking between pages are just simple "a href=" links. A few have "target="_blank" just so those pages will pop up. It's a very simple website with photos and inspirational messages, and a few free printables.

Until recently the query string has never shown up at the end of any of the page links when making the sitemap. Last week, when creating the site map, every single page had that at the end of each page link, and all the characters were identical. I had to delete everything and then have the sitemap creator crawl my site again. Everything looked correct the second time.

[Sarve]

I'm trying to make a site map right now. The address to my site is http://webpages.charter.net/sarve . The places where the query string is showing up is at text/, sarve/, conduct/, conduct/m, conduct/p, lovie is/, sarve/m, sarve/p. The ones with one word are menu pages. The ones with an "m" after them are where the messages are stored. The ones with a "p" after them are where the photos are stored. All of them are coming up in the sitemap creator with a query string after them. There are slight variations to some of the letters in the string, but it doesn't seem to change where I go when I try the different variation. I still see the same thing.

Any more ideas about this little problem?

[Sharron]

I just tried using the url path that you posted below, through Xenu, which is a link checker. It found only two and they are both odd.

I'd have thought it would find all links in your site. I'll try again in a minute Whoops wrote too soon, has found a bunch now. Let me go have a look.

[awasp67]

Not really helpful but half the time when I look at what should be your index page I get the site directory.

I'm assuming you've editted the sitemap now as I can't see any of the ?C=D stuff in there.

[Sharron]

You'll often see a listing of all files and folders in the root of your hosting, IF the browser does not find the index.html or default index. home. page.

If you are uploading an altered index page of any name, while trying to view the page, often it hiccups and shows the directory files.

I know I've done that a million times.

I'm still looking at the links, I see so far nothing out of the ordinary as far as the paths go. In other words I don't see anything with those types of things the site crawler for sitemaps is seeing.

[Sarve]

Not really helpful but half the time when I look at what should be your index page I get the site directory.

I'm assuming you've editted the sitemap now as I can't see any of the ?C=D stuff in there.

I've been having that problem once in a while myself. And I cannot figure out why.

[Sarve]

[QUOTE=Sharron;206284]You'll often see a listing of all files and folders in the root of your hosting, IF the browser does not find the index.html or default index. home. page.

If you are uploading an altered index page of any name, while trying to view the page, often it hiccups and shows the directory files.

QUOTE]

What would keep a browser from from finding the index.htm file? This is something that has just started happening the past few weeks by the way. I cannot think what I might have done to mess things up. Lately I've just been uploading messages as I write them and add a link to each new message on the menu page for that particular subject, on the home page, and on the map.htm page. Everything else is the same as it has been.

[Sharron]

Well it happens for me if I am at the same time uploading the index page and trying to refreash the page before it is finished uploading.

It might happen if you have lets say more then one page in the root called index or home but with different extensions.

Any other reason it might happen I'm not sure.

[webado]

Oh I take part of that back. I just tried clicking on those links again and the correct page showed up. However those characters still should not be at the end of a link. I don't know how they got there or what they mean.

That looks like a page where you have options to sort this way and that.

Removing them from the sitemap doesn't make them unavailable to robots. Removing those parameters from the urls in the sitemap again doesn't change that robots will find such a url and it will be found in navigation on your site.

You need to fix yrou navigation first if you don't want those. And if you want the navigation to have them but not to get them indexed you need to disallow them from robots access in some way.

[webado]

I'm trying to make a site map right now. The address to my site is http://webpages.charter.net/sarve . The places where the query string is showing up is at text/, sarve/, conduct/, conduct/m, conduct/p, lovie is/, sarve/m, sarve/p. The ones with one word are menu pages. The ones with an "m" after them are where the messages are stored. The ones with a "p" after them are where the photos are stored. All of them are coming up in the sitemap creator with a query string after them. There are slight variations to some of the letters in the string, but it doesn't seem to change where I go when I try the different variation. I still see the same thing.

Any more ideas about this little problem?

You have no homepage there, it's a listing of your directory.

You had better take care of this or you will lose all you search engine indexing.




And now the homepage is back again.

[awasp67]

The header but the / in the verify tag is not not valid for your DOCTYPE which I think should be
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

I'm guessing that one or the other is intermittantly breaking the header so the browser displays the file listing instead. Validation shows "end tag for element "HEAD" which is not open" which isn't good. Hopefully fixing the verify and DOCTYPE will be enough to sort that.

The rest of the page doesn't verify but that's another issue.

[webado]

The header but the / in the verify tag is not not valid for your DOCTYPE which I think should be
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

I'm guessing that one or the other is intermittantly breaking the header so the browser displays the file listing instead. Validation shows "end tag for element "HEAD" which is not open" which isn't good. Hopefully fixing the verify and DOCTYPE will be enough to sort that.

The rest of the page doesn't verify but that's another issue.

True this is a serious bug which affects search engine robots like Googlebot's ability to index thee page.

It does not however cause the intermittent problem of the missing index page. That's a server issue.

[awasp67]

I thought that might be the case as I guessed it either broke the header or it didn't.

Personally all the other problems are not as important as this one, it'll worry visitors that don't understand it and looks, to me, as an opening for, what's the polite term I'm looking for?

[Sarve]

You have no homepage there, it's a listing of your directory.

You had better take care of this or you will lose all you search engine indexing.


And now the homepage is back again.

That's what it's been doing to me also. It's there and then not. I've not changed anything. It use to work beautifully for me, then all of sudden this problem started.

[Sarve]

The header but the / in the verify tag is not not valid for your DOCTYPE which I think should be
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

I'm guessing that one or the other is intermittantly breaking the header so the browser displays the file listing instead. Validation shows "end tag for element "HEAD" which is not open" which isn't good. Hopefully fixing the verify and DOCTYPE will be enough to sort that.

The rest of the page doesn't verify but that's another issue.


Thanks for the information. I'll try to tackle this tomorrow and see if I can't find some way to fix this.

[webado]

Sandra, your server is flaky, for real.

It randomly dumps the directory listing instead of showing the homepage.

This is not something you can be doing yourself in any way no matter if you have the worst code on the homepage - which you don't have, though it needs fixing.

It's a problem with the server. It's like Apache is turning on and off directory listing and forgets which is the default index page.

I wonder if there is an .htaccess file there and if maybe it's wonky in any way.

[jonra01]

There is definitely something strange going on here. If you don't already have a .htaccess file you could try creating one with the lines of code below to fix part of this problem.

Copy and paste the 5 lines below into a plain text file. Use a text editor like Notepad that won't change anything. Save this file with the name .htaccess Be sure to include the . at the beginning of the name. Check to see if you already have a file of this name in the root directory for your site. If you do then add these lines of code to that file. If you don't then upload the new .htaccess file to the root directory of your site with your ftp program. Make sure the filename doesn't get changed by windows. It should not be .htaccess.txt The full name of the file should be .htaccess If anything goes wrong and your site doesn't seem to work right afterwards simply go back with your ftp client and delete the file or rename it. Make sure you don't already have a .htaccess file

<Files .htaccess>
deny from all
</Files>
Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

[Sharron]

If you do already have an .htaccess file, Before you remove it or delete it, try renaming it first. Name it for instance .htaccess.orig. Then if you upload the one Jonra suggested you still have a copy of the original file. If for any reason you need to go back to the original one, all you would need to do is rename it again removing the last .orig.

[Sharron]

here is a correct doc type:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

[Sarve]

I called Charter and after explaining the problem, and telling them what you all noticed, they took a look. They think they'll have the problem fixed within the hour so I guess we'll wait and see if that takes care of it.

[FrankV]

Ok. That has got to be one of the strangest things I've seen. I went to "Happy Sabbath!" and it loaded with no problem. Then I refreshed the page and got an index listing of the files and directories on the site, but no index page loaded. I refreshed about 5 times and then got the index page again.

Magic? Gremlins? HTM oops? I don't know. Just strange. I hope they get it fixed for you.

[webado]

I called Charter and after explaining the problem, and telling them what you all noticed, they took a look. They think they'll have the problem fixed within the hour so I guess we'll wait and see if that takes care of it.

The hour is up.

Just now I ran Xenu and got the index listing for another folder: /loveis/ .

Definitely not fixed.

A few minutes ago I got this.

[Sharron]

yep I got the root directory listing

[awasp67]

Me too, sorry.

[Sarve]

Well.... Let's look at the bright side. You all know what's in my directories. Remember it. If some other major problem comes up, you will already have a mental image of what's in the directories and maybe can help me fix that problem too!

[Sharron]

lol, I copied and pasted the page as I saw it, so I will be able to tell exactly what it said!

[Sarve]

Okay, I put Jonra's .htaccess file in the directory. Try it again.

[Sarve]

GROAN! It still isn't working!

[Sarve]

I'm on hold with Charter right now. Keep your fingers crossed!

[Sarve]

It just started working. Please give it a try! Let me know how it does for you.

[Sarve]

Take that back it's not working and right now I'm being told the fault is on my side. All index files should be html, not htm. And if it still doesn't work I am to upload all the files all over again.

[jonra01]

I see you have renamed index.htm to index.html This seems to be working, at least I haven't been able to get the directory listing to show. Not all hosting services allow the use of a .htaccess file. Some allow it, but won't tell you it will work. I'm curious to know if it will work for your site. You can try a simple experiment to find out if it works. This might be worth knowing for future enhancements to your site or to control spammers if you ever add a forum or blog to the site.

First create two new directories. Call one of them x and the other y then add this line to the .htaccess file -

Redirect 301 /x http://webpages.charter.net/sarve/y

If you get redirected to the y directory when you try to go to http://webpages.charter.net/sarve/x/ then the .htaccess file is working. If you end up at http://webpages.charter.net/sarve/x/ then the .htaccess won't work on your hosting service.

[Sarve]

I see you have renamed index.htm to index.html This seems to be working, at least I haven't been able to get the directory listing to show. Not all hosting services allow the use of a .htaccess file. Some allow it, but won't tell you it will work. I'm curious to know if it will work for your site. You can try a simple experiment to find out if it works. This might be worth knowing for future enhancements to your site or to control spammers if you ever add a forum or blog to the site.

First create two new directories. Call one of them x and the other y then add this line to the .htaccess file -

Redirect 301 /x http://webpages.charter.net/sarve/y

If you get redirected to the y directory when you try to go to http://webpages.charter.net/sarve/x/ then the .htaccess file is working. If you end up at http://webpages.charter.net/sarve/x/ then the .htaccess won't work on your hosting service.

Yes it does seem to be working!! Thank you to all of you for your help. If there are any Charter people in here, thank you for that bit of advice. I appreciate it!

John, I'll give your idea a try. I'm curious too.

[webado]

Ok, to let the server serve either index.html or index.htm as homepage when nothing is specified. You can add this directive to the .htaccess file:


DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html index.php

It will use index.htm if it finds it;
if not, it will use index.html if it finds it;
if not it will using index.php if it finds it;
if not is just does the directory listing dump (or doesn't if that is suppressed).

[awasp67]

It seems to be working now, so far as I can see.

Since it was sometimes accepting index.htm as the default I think charter have some issues to sort out, but alls well that ends well as they say.

[fuzzy]

The query strings that were getting appended to your links are for sorting the order of the items in the directories. I see this regularly in my server stats when bots find their way into directories that don't have an index file. The first part is the column to be sorted, the second (after the =) is the direction: A is Ascending, D is Descending... ;)