Strange Search Query Appearing on Google Index - “/?q=Save+Us+From+Berlusconi”

Question

Strange.

Stripping my site URL, and searching for the term "/?q=Save+Us+From+Berlusconi" on Google shows up this blog post written way back in 2009: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021647.html

My site is facing something similar.

What should I do? Is this really a bug from Google? It looks like Berlusconi is the prime minister of Italy; however my site has nothing to do with political stuffs. I see there are a couple of threads in Google forum -- older ones -- that talk about this strange query indexed on Google.

Example query: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22websites+to+automatically+post+blog+post+on+twitter%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Check the second URL.

Answer 1

This is not a WordPress question … yet.

There are two ways to handle this.

1. Don’t do anything. One more indexed page will not harm your site’s karma. This is not spam. Someone has has probably created a link to your site with this query string to trick the auto-complete tool on Google. The link may be gone now, but Google doesn’t forget. So what?

2. Fix your search. I tested the search string on the website from your profile and I got many “results”. That’s a problem. You serve exactly the same set of articles for every search. This is not useful for your visitors. Plus, if some bad guy creates a file with 10.000 links to different searches you get a serious duplicate content problem. Install a good search plugin – I suggest Relevanssi – and make sure to show only real results.