Fake Translation URLS pointing to my site?

[lorien1973]

Should I be concerned about things such as this showing up in WMT?

http://www.example.com/french.php?u=arabic.php%3Fu%3Dhttp://www.example.com/mypage.html

It shows up about 100 times in my WMT not found pages. I do not have a french.php on my site that does translation. Anyone seen this before? Always the same language, pointing to disparate pages on the site.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] use example.com. It can never be owned [/edit]

[selomelo]

I have seen a similar pattern with site:operator:

mysite.com/?q=pageword?ref=somesite.com

The "mysite.com/?q=pageword" is an existing page on my site, while the "?ref=somesite.com?" is not.

In my specific case, the site is a dictionary site, the "pageword" part is a dictionary entry.
It is strange whence google gets this url.

[lorien1973]

What's odd is that my site does not have a single .php page. It's a yahoo store and .php pages don't even work. So the url is just totally made up somewhere. I've searched google for "french.php?=arabic.php" or whatever it was and nothing came up.

[londrum]

if you do an 'inurl' search it comes up with a few.

[ecmedia]

I have seen exactly the same. I think it is a Google problem. Or a bunch of crooks are misleading Google.

[tedster]

If your server is responding with a 404 status then you have no worries. It's only if your "error page" really responds with a 200 status that this kind of thing makes trouble.

[lorien1973]

It's only if your "error page" really responds with a 200 status that this kind of thing makes trouble.

And what if it does respond with a 200 status. I have a yahoo store and my "404" page is fake; it does respond with a 200 status.

HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:02:01 GMT

Scratch that. The URL I posted above (with my domain name re-inserted) does reply a 404 code. the 404.html page responds a 200 though.

Or a bunch of crooks are misleading Google.

I thought the same thing. I thought they'd upload that file onto unprotected servers, translate the pages and change the adsense ads to a new google account; but that wasn't the case on the ones I looked at. I'm not sure what the point of this is.

[foxtunes]

Noticed this as well appearing in my logs. Strange....Maybe Googlebot is picking up proxy pages and relating them to our sites.