GoogleBots and the Phantom ASP.NET MVC Page

No this is not the newest nerd science fiction film directed by James Cameron, instead this is my current problem with ASP.NET MVC 2 and it is a huge one. I was recently reading Justin Etheredge’s blog CodeThinked and his complaints about his Google page ranking. So being curious to how my main site was doing, I began using several tools to get an SEO grade for my main site. The first tool I used was WebSite Grader to give me a grade on my SEO.

This grade was poop! But I read a little more and realized that the page Website Grader had read was not my main page. How do I know that? Well for starters, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to keep a page’s title “Index”.

So what is the page the GoogleBot is seeing? I decided to use Web Sniffer a tool that let’s you mimic different clients and this is what I got.

WHAT THE F@$*%!!!!!! Where is that coming from. The amazing thing is that a page with a title and an empty body get’s a score at all! Obviously, if you go to my site you’ll realize that this is not the main page. What is also strange is that nowhere in my current application does this view exist, well how could it?!?! So as I tried some other pages to see what I would get, and check it out.

Ok so I got one page getting a grade. But something strange is occurring. The crawler tried to traverse a page that doesn’t exist! On the good side it did find metadata.

So what is the culprit here? I have no clue, but I am leaning towards routing. The strange “Services/About” page is giving me a strong a hint that something is not right. But routing wouldn’t explain the phantom view that I am getting. Who wrote it? Is it from some lost civilization of MVC developers and I was lucky enough to find it? “I See You” phantom ASP.NET MVC view, now you need to go away so my real page can get indexed, UGGGGG!