Strange Link to my website

Anybody know what this means?

[twist]

I found this link to my website which I will call example.com,

www.[some-hosting-site.com]/go.php?to=http://example.com

My site has nothing to do with hosting. I also have no idea how I would find this link on their site. Are they pulling some BS? What should I do?

[edited by: tedster at 3:01 am (utc) on Nov. 8, 2005]

[tedster]

no idea how I would find this link on their site

This URL was in your logs, then? If so, it's probably whta's called referrer spam.

[twist]

It's not in my logs (well, it probably is now that I have clicked it), it showed up in the yahoo serps.

If I clicked the link in the serps it took me to my site, why would they do this? I guess in theory, if they were to replace my link to my website as the first serp result for my website, all requests for my website would run through them. Something seems really wrong about that, but what can I do?

Ok, so this website has nothing to do with my website, yet people will find it in the serps when looking for my site. Is this the 302 thing people were complaining about awhile ago on here?

[twist]

I can't edit my last post but here is what it has,

yahoo search - mysitename

result -
10. mysitename
www.[redirect-site]/go.php?to=http://mysitename.com

Click the link and it takes you directly to my site. Can I report this to yahoo or someone else. They are obviously doing this maliciously since I can't think of any other reason they would do this. I'm sure this is an old problem, if someone could point me to a thread that can help me deal with this, that would be great.

[quadcity]

> They are obviously doing this maliciously since I
> can't think of any other reason they would do this.
It could just be a poorly-coded redirect script. (To track clicks.)

It could also be a hijack.

[larryhatch]

Strip of the last part of the URL and see who the heck they are first. -Larry

[tedster]

Well, I saw the original url before the edit -- it definitely looks like a hosting business, as twist said. They're on a .ru TLD but it is an English language site.

[larryhatch]

OK, I missed that somehow (its late here).
Its starting to sound fishy in any case,
The next thing I'd do is search for a snippet of text from the targetted page
(twist's page) and Yahoo for that as an exact quote. See what pops up, and in what order. -Larry

[twist]

See what pops up, and in what order.

When I use a quote I only get my page. It doesn't seem like a hijack, unless this is the early stage of a hijack.

I did find another thread were someone said this is a common problem, but they didn't really explain why they do this, just that it's a problem. They talked about setting up a 404 to stop it but didn't give any examples. I posted a question on how to setup a 404 on the Apache forum to stop a outside redirect but haven't gotton a reply yet.

I'm really baffled at this point, I was hoping this was a common problem with a common solution, but it looks like i'm going to need do some searching.