Porn sites directing traffic to my site! Help!!

[rgregory]

Alright here's the story. I just recently bought the .com version of the name I have been using for my personal site with a .net address. So i redirect the .net traffic to the .com folder on my server (i was using two to redesign) and installed my analytics (which I had not done on this site previously, just depending on wordpress stats).

Now I am getting about 10 hits a day from searches for some REALLY CRAZY words on google. I mean nasty porn combinations that I won't go into. After some detective work, they are leading to a forum that I set up on the .net as a trial of the phpbb software to see how easy it was to set up. I just left it open and forgot about it. Apparantly, it got hit with the phpbb security hole and hacked and spammed by some crusty porn spammers. The forum has been deleted as soon as I figured this out.

Is there anything that I can do to stop this traffic or am I at the beck and call of these porn forums that link to my site? I mean they are getting 404 pages, but will this have an repercussions on me (other than skewed analytics results)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jeffro]

Ouch. This happens far too often. Forums across the web, lost and forgotten only to succumb to spam. Until those search results to your .net forum disappear from Google, I don't see how you'll be able to stop that traffic from getting to your site only to see a 404 page. Since the forum was on the .net site, is that the site that is getting the 404 errors? Or is it the .com?

[Ryan]

It will just skew your analytics, that's all.

This is an example of why a javascript solution is better for analytics as the bots are unlikely to get picked up. Google Analytics is the most common tool for this.

[Ryan]

Now I am getting about 10 hits a day from searches ...

I missed that bit last time. If it's only 10 hits then don't worry about it. That's absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. I assumed you were getting hit with thousands of them.

If it gets into the millions it could start over loading the server, but it's unlikely you will ever get that many spam bots hitting your site at once unless it becomes known as a high profile spam target.

[Cais]

You know you are getting traffic to that specific(?) page(s); why not just put something there that auto-redirects to a more useful page?

It may only be search bots for now but you never know where the magic hit is going to originate from. I would look at it as a marketing opportunity

Just a thought ...