7 replies to this topic

[SERPico]

Hi Guys,

Today, i discovered a link like this in my logs, assume domainname.com is my domain, as you can see there is a folder called ~domainname in the URL - but the thing is i don't have a folder like that?
h ttp://www.domainname.com/~domainname/pagename.php

I would really like to know how to stop this from happening as i don't want duplicate URL's being presented to Google or any other SE by competitors trying to devalue my pages.

A URL as the one in bold should deliver a 404 error.

Thanks in advance guys!

[Jill]

So does that URL go to an actual page? Do you know how that URL got out there to begin with? You could probably block via robots.txt anything like this:

CODE

http://www.domainname.com/~

Which at least wouldn't allow any of those to get indexed. But that doesn't sound like it's your actual problem?

[SERPico]

Hi Jill,

The URL in bold goes to the actual page but it is different then the original URL - you can basically put anything in that path, any word will do and it will still resolve to the original page as the server probably looks to find the page name and it finds it.

I can block that fictious folder through robots.txt but then i am not addressing the real problem here although i can't place a finger on it as it is a server side technical issue which i am not very familiar with.

Edit: I see now that it only is the username from my FTP details that resolves, not other words.

Edited by SERPico, 02 September 2007 - 10:32 AM.

[DanThies]

You should be able to prevent that from resolving in your server configuration, SERP.

[Randy]

Sounds like the server is set up to allow access to the FTP via HTTP, or that it's configured to pull the ~username files from the right place.

I have no way to test this one because none of my servers are set up to allow any such things, but you may want to give it a whirl.

CODE

RedirectMatch 301 ^/~domainname/(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1

In theory I think it should work, or at least be close. It'll only match on those tilde'd requests, then effectively strips it out and drops the rest of the path/page name info back in there.

[rolf]

I hosted several domains through one particular host at one point and whenever they set up a new account they gave me a temporary address to use until the nameservers etc. were all set up and working. The format of the temp URL was serverIPaddress.tld/~username/file.htm , which would also work once the domain was in place just replacing the Server IP with the domain.

Hope that helps to give it some context. I don't think it's anything to worry about unless you start handing that address out, but it would be interesting to know who/how it got into your server logs.

[chrishirst]

did you check that the IP IS a slurp IP and not just a cracking attempt with a spoofed UA?

[SERPico]

Thank you all for your replies guys,

I discover how it came into my logs, it has to do with a inquiry that has been made regarding the SSL implementation.

As it was reported that ht tps: //secure.bluehost.com/~username/pagename.php would make the page SSL and only the part after the .com/ shows in my getclicky.com logs.

Now it makes things so much clearer, thank you all very much for your support!