Google sending unwanted traffic to our (now disabled) redirect page

[rumirunto]

For the last 48 hours, we've been getting THOUSANDS of unwanted visitors from google searches for all sorts of adult keywords.

We had a "/redirect?url=<someurl>" page on our website that was left unprotected, and apparently spammers are using it to piggyback on to our high PR by feeding Google with links such as:

http://ourwebsite.org/redirect/?url=spamsite.com?ADULT_KEYWORDS

So... we're getting *thousands* of visits from people searching for "hot grannies" and all sorts of other such keywords.

"/redirect" has always been in our robots.txt file, which I would have thought would prevent this. We disabled that redirect page and posted a URL removal request to Google for this page 2 days ago, but the traffic keeps on coming, and is actually getting worse.

HELP!

What can we do to stop this?!

Also: any idea of how are they feeding those urls to google? would it be enough for them to just add these links and keywords to pages they control and that google crawls? seems odd since we are seeing thousands of keyword combinations, and they are all getting such high rankings.

[edited by: tedster at 6:27 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2008]
[edit reason] de-link the example [/edit]

[denisl]

Had exactly the same problem 3 weeks ago and dealt with it in the same way as you. I had 2 days of very high traffic, a lot less on the third day, and totally gone in a week to ten days.
I also already had that file disallowed in robots.

As far as I can see so far, it has not done me any harm. I didn't like going into WMT and seeing the Top Search Terms list full of those key words. WMT was also showing 160,000 pages blocked by robots file - that is back to normal also.

[rumirunto]

Posting "remove from index" requests to Google didn't do much. What we ended up doing is making sure that all those spammy requests get 410 return codes, (404 won't work) and then removed our redirection page from robots.txt. Googlebot is now crawling all those thousands and thousands of urls and removing them from their index. We're still getting clobbered (25K extra visitors yesterday), but the traffic is slowing down, so this is indeed working.