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Recently we've talked about how Google's Webmaster Console has been getting better, although it still needs a lot of work.

Today it got a stiff kick in the backside from Yahoo who keep rolling out neat new features for on their rival to Webmaster Console: Site Explorer. What is Yahoo's cool new tool?

A Solution for Dynamic URLs

Let imagine that you've set up a tracking URL for a banner ad such as alledia.com/?ad_id=1234, which is basically a duplicate URL for alledia.com. You can tell Yahoo that anything that conforms to the "ad_id" parameter following the ? will by a duplicate URL to the primary and Yahoo will rewrite the URL to default to the primary.

When Will This Be Useful?

It can be used to remove all of these from Yahoo's index:

• Affiliate links
  
• Advertising links
• PDF and Print pages
• Removing whole Joomla components
  
• Plenty of other situations mentioned on the Yahoo blog.

Remind Me Again Why I Want to Remove Pages from Google and Yahoo...

Back in the days when websites were hard to build, large websites would generally outrank small websites. However, now that scrapers can create 1000 page websites in the time it takes to read this sentence, things aren't so simple. Sometimes less is more. If a page doesn't have any useful information or if its a duplicate of another, better-established page, then you should remove it from search engines. Yahoo's blog sums it up well.

"Utilizing the 'Dynamic URL Rewriting' feature enables:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we'll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site."
  

Comments (1)

robots.txt
written by trichosis, August 26, 2007

i'm having the same problem but i have solved it with adding

disallow:/*?*

to my robots.txt

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