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up vote 7 down vote favorite

I'm experiencing something very strange.

Whatever I type in the browser like for instance:

qqqqq.mydomain.com the homepage loads. There is even a URL indexed in google which goes something like this:

www.somesite.comwww.mydomain.com/somearticle

The page loads, and the browser keeps displaying the url above.

Should I be worried? What could cause this?

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DNS settings. You might be worried if someone tries to use black SEO against your website to push it down in results. – MarcinWolny Feb 26 at 14:29
im not noticing any shady urls in google index. but how would this black hat seo work exactly? Appart from the strangeness is there any downside to it? or possible exploit? – user1721135 Feb 26 at 14:37
1  
someone could basically force google to index thousands of webpages - this would fool google into thinking that there are many websites exactly duplicating your content. With a bit of bad luck: Your dodgy URLs would be indexed higher than the correct website, and your whole site would slide down the hill in google. – MarcinWolny Feb 26 at 15:07
MarcinWolny: to be fair, most websites are "vulnerable" to some sort of "attack" like that. Most websites accept any parameter on a url as well. Something like http://example.com/index.html?param123=4567 that causes google to crawl on unlimited number of duplicate URLs. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Feb 26 at 16:43
yes but how would that push my results below? What could a black hat seo gain from that? qqqq.domain.com would still show my own domain. – user1721135 Feb 26 at 16:56

1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Its a combination of two factors:

  1. You have a wildcard dns entry. In your DNS you have an entry like *.example.com. A record like that will forward all subdomains to the address specified
  2. Your website is set as the default host on your webserver. That means that whatever request comes in for any unrecognized domain, it will get served as your website.

If you remove the wildcard DNS record, you won't have the problem. Users that try to visit www.somesite.comwww.example.com/somearticle will get an error message at the DNS level saying that that www.somesite.comwww.example.com could not be found.

You could also change your web server configuration to set your site as a virtual host rather than default host. This way you could choose what to do with the default host. For example you could redirect all those requests to your web site, or you could show an error message.

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