Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My (custom) error logs are filled with
404: Target:/searchpage.html?[parameters snipped]
referer:/this_one_page.html
Most of the attempts have as one of the parameters "sitesearch=example.com" where example.com is not mine, but is some porn or spam site.
Odd thing is I noticed this because of 404 errors; The page isn't found because it isn't there. The page exists in a subdomain and in looking into this tonight, I see similar requests successfully retrieving the search page in the proper subdirectory.
The query is always the same: "abc123" and cutting and pasting the GET requests into my browser results in google returning 0 hits from my site (the domain that is the real "searchsite").
The requests all have my pub-id in them. There are no other log entries for the IPs performing the GETs and there are very few repeats. The page is seeing about 10 of these per day, give or take.
I have a feeling that someone has written a page that opens my URL in an IFRAME. I fetched one of the urls located in the sitesearch parameter, and it was a pron site stuffed with porn keywords. Best I could tell from a quick look, it either did some self-modifying code generating more js and then a document.write with a link and jumped to it, or it used javascript to extract the referrer info, then passed the info along to a third site by opening an IFRAME. I really didn't care to study the code that much and js is not my native language.
Anyone heard about anything like this?
Do I need to gather up all this info and send it up to AdSense support?
Ann
I might remove the page but I'd like to find out what is going on. I realized it can't be inside an IFrame because I am not seeing any GETS for any of the objects on the page by the same IP, so it isn't being requested by browsers. Also the agent string is always the same.
So now I feel that the URL is being passed around a bot net for some nefarious reason, and I'd like to understand it.
Just change your code to check the GET parameters. If there are parameters that are not correct. Don't show ads. Then you don't even have to worry about your adsense code.
Probably worth building something into your template.
I also use a bit of flood protection type code to avoid flashing ads on repeated clicks. (well in fact I don't show any of the page). (Just exclude the google bots from this code.).
