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I restored a website on a new server after it was down (mistakenly deleted) for a while, and it immediately got bombarded with requests to non-existing pages like /tissue-salts-for-weight-loss.html and /exercises-to-lose-fat.htm (the website is not about weight loss).
Requests are coming from bots (Semrush, Petal, Google etc). I pointed the domain to another server (without moving the site) and these requests followed.
What is going with the domain? Should I be concerned?
So I dealt with something similar a while back and it was a real pain. I was constantly getting requests for random pdfs and Mexican food recipes in my logs. The IPs were Googlebot, Bingbot, etc (their valid IPs too)
I found out about it initially when I saw a spammy looking domain show up in my backlink profile in Search Console and Ahrefs. In Ahrefs, though I saw that is was via redirect.
This took me down a rabbit hole of dns/ip address lookups, trace routes...the whole business. Long story short - ended up resolving to the ip address of a Cooking Site in Mexico. It was definitely hacked.
As an SEO, it bugged the heck out of me because basically it was like Googlebot crawling my site looking for these random Mexican food recipes, smart appliance manuals and getting 404s.
What did I do?
Ultimately, there wasn't much else I could do! A couple months later it showed up as "lost" in my backlink report on Ahrefs. Happiest I've ever been to lose a link.
My site was less than a year old at the time...so I can't really speak to how this might affect your organic traffic/rankings.
All that said, the only thing I'd be concerned about is your server getting bombarded. If your situation is like mine, it will stop eventually.
EDIT: and your hosting bill...mine went up not by a ton...but fairly significantly.
