First of all, my URL - http://www.candoboatloans.com.au
In webmaster tools I am receiving many links such as:
http://www.candoboatloans.com.au/?wvsessionid=wv7d73ec84dc9a4a97b27fb3928927d405
http://www.candoboatloans.com.au/used.html?wvsessionid=wv8dfe2ff8bc24463f894053b1e5153d0b
http://www.candoboatloans.com.au/jet-ski-finance.html?wvsessionid=wv246bfb5c95524129b0751fbc91dab2ee
Something seems to be auto-generating these weird peramaters since new ones keep popping up in webmaster tools.
I have tried clearing the Joomla cache. I have tried sending all URL's that contain the peramater of wvsessionid to a hard 404. Although none of these were successful... They keep on displaying in webmaster tools as 'Not Found' errors.
As soon as these starting showing up, our website dropped from page 1 number 3, to somewhere in page 10.
The pages with the wvsessionid in them are basically duplicate pages of the ones without them. For example,
This page:
http://www.candoboatloans.com.au/used.html?wvsessionid=wv8dfe2ff8bc24463f894053b1e5153d0b
Is a duplicate of this page:
http://www.candoboatloans.com.au/used.html
This means that Google (and other search engines) are finding these are duplicate content and therefore are penalising our website.
We tried getting a Joomla expert onto this. He said he found a problem and that it would cost us more than $1000 to get it fixed... he refused to tell us what the problem was. I got the vibe that he knew it was simple to fix, but he just wanted a decent amount for the job.
Does anyone have any idea to why this is happening?
