Im currently building an admin panel for my website and i need clarification on the use of query strings.

I have a page which contains some articles and when you click on the "edit" button it will take you to the link /admin/articles/?article=[Article's ID] and then underneath the row you clicked all the information about the article will be displayed.

If the ?article=[Article's ID] matches up to an article on the page then there isn't an issue, however when the ?article=[Article's ID] doesn't match up for example ?article=1&page=2 then im not sure what i should do. Do i issue a 404 error or simply a message saying that the article cannot be found on this page?

I have attached some images which show you the current state of play. Do you think this is the correct way of going about it?

article.png - /admin/articles/
article_1.png - /admin/articles/?article=1
article_2.png - /admin/articles/?article=1&page=2

Your edit page should simply ignore any parameters it does not need.

Thanks, How does this stand with SEO and web crawlers?

Web crawlers shouldn't be inside your admin panel xD

Set your ROBOTS meta tag to noindex,nofollow.

I would handle any incorrect values on the GET string - a simple "invalid arguments: click to return to somewhere" message - I'd also log such errors to see how many occured.

Excluding crawlers by use of robots.txt is a normal activity - it'll have no bearing on their assessment of your other pages.