Search Console, Lawyer Websites and ?refpageviewid=
By Raouf on 19 September, 2022
Hey, this is the SEO team at Fuelist Digital. We thought it would be fun to start logging quick write-ups on some of the SEO tasks we come across in our day-to-day work. During a routine Google Search Console check for one of our law firm client websites, we came across a rather odd set of pages excluded from indexing due to a 4xx response. All of the page URLs ended in the same query string, “?refpageviewid=“. We needed to know where it was coming from.
Hey, this is the SEO team at Fuelist Digital. We thought it would be fun to start logging quick write-ups on some of the SEO tasks we come across in our day-to-day work. During a routine Google Search Console check for one of our law firm client websites, we came across a rather odd set of pages excluded from indexing due to a 4xx response. All of the page URLs ended in the same query string, “?refpageviewid=“. We needed to know where it was coming from.
Don’t worry, your lawyer website isn’t hacked
If you’re reading this, you probably have the same issue we had and went to Google to figure it out. We’ll save you the stress, this doesn’t mean your website is hacked. (Or at least, ?refpageviewid isn’t coming from a hack.)It’s coming from FindLaw
Supposedly for tracking / analytics purposes, FindLaw adds this query string to the “Visit Website” button link on its law firm profile pages. Their website generates a new ID passed into the query string for each user session.