Forum Moderators: phranque
I have a seach-field on my site which passes the search-term to a results page.
I am recently getting deluged with searches such things like the below:
I%20am%20really%20excited%2E%20Keep%20up%20the%20great%20work%2E%20Good
%20resources%20here%2E%0D%0A%3Ca%20href%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fhometown
%2Eaol%2Ecom%2Fpwukfmel%2Findex1%2Ehtml%20%22%3Easianud
Which, until I stripped the html from search terms, left an open href tag, making my site link to the spammer's site.
Now my search-result page shows: "I AM REALLY EXCITED. KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK. GOOD RESOURCES HERE. ASIANU"
The links seem to come from outside the site, and are associated with no particular user-agent or whatever. The only pattern I have been able to discern is that the people visiting with those terms are coming from covad as well as rogers cable in canada.
Has anyone else seen issues like this? Is there anything to do other than strip the html (preventing the external links out?
Thanks for your help!
--ACB
[edited by: acb123 at 3:17 pm (utc) on July 13, 2007]
Is there anything to do?
Is there another way to stop this nuisance?
So far, what it looks like to me is that people are sending out bots to drop their URLs into blog comments, etc, to bump up their search rankings. By stripping the html, that solves any associative problem (as they seem not to put their site-name into the blog-comments, only into the url).
I am also wondering where the folks are coming from... whether I should ban the ips that come in to those links, OR if I should just try my best to ignore them. Are the IPs coming in via external links, do you think, or do you think the ips that are doing this are the actual bots? they resolve to normal ISPs, like covad, rogers, etc.
Thanks for any/all help.
