Can I stop bogus links to my link directory?

[super70s]

One of my sites is a free link directory which I work hard to maintain properly. When I look at the site counter stats for this site under "entry page" I notice some bogus links to it, such as...

www (mylinkdirectoryname)/index.php?q=boguslink com

I guess whoever does this sees some benefit for hijacking my site's URL. But I work hard to approve each link submission and I'm just wondering if there's any way to prevent people from attaching a link to my site that I didn't approve (aside from fixing the .htaccess file so my site's URLs can only be entered from within my site).

[g1smd]

Can I stop bogus links to my link directory?

No.


However, you can take some steps to ensure that many different types of unwanted incoming request return 404 from your site. I use extensionless URLs and set things so that any incoming request with appended parameters is rejected and 404 is returned.

Some people will recommend redirecting these requests. That's often a bad idea. You should not 'adopt' these junk links in any way.

[getcooking]

[looks like I posted the same time g1smd updated the previous post]

Let me see if I'm understanding this correctly...

You own Site A which is at www.example.com and links out to sites you approve in a format like www.example.com/index.php?q=approvedurl

Someone has created a link using your domain but appending their own, non-approved site to it like www.example.com/index.php?q=unapprovedurl

How do you maintain your approved links? Surely you should be able to match q= against your approved list and if it's not there, redirect it or 404 error it? That would make the bad site's efforts null and void.

Or am I misunderstanding the problem?

[super70s]

You own Site A which is at www.example.com and links out to sites you approve in a format like www.example.com/index.php?q=approvedurl

No, the only format on my site is the main category and the sub-category (I don't happen to allow any entries in the main category).

So, going by the first example on my site, it would look like this:

www(mylinkdirectoryname)/Arts_and_Humanities/Art_History/

The entries I have approved for this sub-category would all appear on this page.

What these jerks are doing is hijacking my URL, and it looks like this: www.example.com/index.php?q=unapprovedurl. It looks like a regular page on my site, but their site is the only one listed on this page.

This ticks me off and I was wondering if I can stop this.

[super70s]

I use extensionless URLs and set things so that any incoming request with appended parameters is rejected and 404 is returned.

Could you be more specific on how to do this, or would it take someone with a lot of programming knowledge? My site was developed by phpLinkDirectory, for what that's worth.

[lucy24]

Three lines in mod_rewrite. See you next door in Apache ;)

[g1smd]

What these jerks are doing is hijacking my URL, and it looks like this: www.example.com/index.php?q=unapprovedurl. It looks like a regular page on my site, but their site is the only one listed on this page.

I read that with alarm. That looks like a programming screwup of massive proportions - indeed it looks like hackers can do whatever they like.

Where are these pages appearing? Are they listed in Googe/Bing search results?

[super70s]

Where are these pages appearing? Are they listed in Googe/Bing search results?

The only place I've seen the URLs are in the site counter stats under "Entry Pages." But they could be in Google/Bing for all I know.

I know how to fix the .htaccess file to prevent bogus links coming in from the outside but I don't want to prevent legitimate links coming in too.

[super70s]

Three lines in mod_rewrite. See you next door in Apache ;)

Well at least one of the moderators in there seems like he has little patience with "questions that are asked every 2 days" and I'm afraid this would be one of them.

[anallawalla]

But they could be in Google/Bing for all I know.

It would be useful to your cause if you could check that and report back. I believe what g1smd is trying to establish is whether someone can execute a query by changing your URL variables, causing non-approved pages to be created, at least enough to get them indexed.

[LegoGeek]

I have no knowledge of your website script without seeing your site. But I'm guessing your website basically queries websites and gives end user information about the website.

Like pagerank, alexa, google reader subscibers, backlinks etc...?

I'm guessing you have a backlink to the queried site, and that's what balck hatters are targetting by creating lots of queries for their site, so in effect they just generate backlinks?

It's an easy patch to fix, I'm guessing just remove the backlink? But then you want to leave backlinks for certain sites, and not all. That is tricky.