A while back, I noticed in AwStats that one of my sites was ranking for terms like “buy Viagra”. Since I avoid Viagra stuff like the plague, I started looking around to see where this was coming from. I searched on Google and found the pages in my site with these suspicious search terms – sure enough, they were all in this same little-used folder under one of my scripts, buried about four folders down. And then, of course, these pages of mine redirected them to another site – the people who really wanted to sell the Viagra.
Apparently this is called “parasite hosting“.
It’s a good idea to check your sites and make sure this isn’t happening. If it is happening, congratulations! You have an authority site someone wants to leech off of rather than struggle to create their own, or buy space on yours (the legitimate way to leech off someone else’s authority).
FYI, I got rid of my spammers by deleting all those files they’d created and making the folders all below 777 on permissions (this entailed dumping a script I’d been using since I was a noob, because it simply could not be configured for less than 777 on some folders).
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Updated: April 7, 2007, first published: Posted in Stuff that Sucks.
