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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.