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Tuesday 21 February 2012

I think I broke Google

A tweet from @MarkMaceSmith asking :
 Why have you got hundreds of my images on your website Paul Regan?
Had me wondering what the hell !?

A quick look and he was right (kind of).. But not just his images, EVERYONES!

http://www.paulregan.co.uk/m/viewAlbum?uname=110372774069389594216&aid=5492124562868999953&start=0

Shows his gallery on my domain.  Note the the Picasa Mobile URL (/m/) which also gave me the answer.

I have masked the Picasa URL using an Apache rewriteRule on my site :
RewriteRule   ^m/(.*)   http://picasaweb.google.com/m/$1   [NC,P,L]
It appears the Google spiders came along and followed this all the way through Picasa's structure.  I don't know how deep but Google site:www.paulregan.co.uk/m/ currently returns >250K links and every one of them works!

I can probably fix this with robots.txt, but ..

  • Should I?  
  • Have I inadvertently discovered SEO gold? 
  • Will I be struck off and sent to web-master jail/gaol? (I probably should be)

#twitter

1 comment:

  1. Go with the flow.
    Let the force be with you.
    If you strike gold
    Remember who told you.

    ReplyDelete