Tom56 - 8:13 pm on Feb 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

This is my first post so I hope I'm in the right spot. My problem isn't just with Google, but shows in Yahoo, MSN, etc., but Google is the biggest and best, so probably would get the most attention.

I was notified by a person in New Jersey (I'm in Washington state and my web site is hosted in Virginia) that when he clicked on my link in the search engine results sometimes he would be sent to my site, but other times he would be sent to an adult site. Sometimes the adult site would come up first and other times it would take several clicks on the same link, but the adult site would come up eventually.

I tested and the same thing happened for me too. The problem occurs with either first or second ranking links to my site or with other links way down in the basement. I tried different search engines and different browsers and got the same result. I've tried the same thing with links to other sites in the results, but mine is the only one that goes to the adult site.

I notified my web site host, who is extremely fast and helpful with support, but he couldn't duplicate the situation and says everything is ok with the servers.

My page views which are generally around 4000 to 5000 per day are down by 1000 to 1500 per day, so I know something is haywire.

I thought about browser hijack, so I took an old hard drive, fdisked, formatted and made a fresh install of Windows, fresh download and install of Firefox, ZoneAlarm and AVG anti-virus. I got the same result with the adult site.

I checked in Google's directory and clicked on my link and I got the same problem, sometimes my site and sometimes the adult site, but when I went to DMOZ directory and clicked on my link only my site came up with a dozen clicks. I have a page of links to my pages on my computer and none of those links come up with the adult site. I've gone to other web sites that have a link to my site and the adult site doesn't come up when those links are clicked. It only seems to be happening with search engine results links.

When the cursor is held over the link in the results my URL shows in the status bar, even when the adult site comes up.

I've read of hijacking web pages in the forum, but nothing quite like this, they aren't duplicating my page content the resulting adult page is pretty brazen and definitely doesn't appear as being associated with my site.

I have information about the adult page, it links to several other adult sites and is apparently put up by an affiliate of the sites. I had planned to notify his ISP, but the information I've gathered indicates that the ISP may be involved or is the culprit.

Reading an older post gave me the idea to check domain names and I discovered that someone has recently gotten a domain with the same name as mine, but with net instead of com. Preliminary checking doesn't show that he's involved with the other problem, but I haven't done any deep checking yet.

I've tried inurl: and inanchor: and they don't show anything unusual. My position in the search engines are the same, although the problem has only been going on for a short period of time.

Besides giving my web site a bad name by association the thieves are stealing a lot of visitors from my site, or at least preventing them from visiting, and playing heck with my retirement income.

I've notified Google and Yahoo, but haven't heard back from either of them.

Any help would really be appreciated.

[edited by: tedster at 3:30 am (utc) on April 10, 2006]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]