I'm seeing a weird url in my google analytics. It's http://www.lisaredstone.commessage57741318.cenokos.ru/ and it redirects to an ecommece site. My clients site is http://www.lisaredstone.com. What's the story with this - is it something I need to be worried about? How do the .ru's leverage it to their benefit? What actions should I take?
It could just be someone is duplicating your GA account number and using a rewrite redirect. the .ru is a russian extension. I did find this page http://www.cradlecloud.com/how-to-ban-and-block-cenoval-ru-referrer-spam/ that may help you. but if it isn't actively redirecting any of the links on the site (which I tried several) I don't think there is anything to worry about, but someone who knows more about site security may be able to tell you more.
Related
I have taken over an old domain and put a new site on it, it use to be a membership site so I have thousands of old URLs that now go to a 404 page.
Should I redirect these to the homepage to keep the link juice, it is a relative subject, so the links are useful.
If so how would I do it? This is a wordpress site.
/user/*
/image//
What is the best way to deal with these 404's?
I would redirect them to your homepage. Google (and all other crawlers) will notice the change, so you can provide a better and continuous user experience for your users.
There is a brilliant plugin called Redirection (https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) that will allow you to configure redirects in WP, including logs of 404's that visitors to your site experience to help you know where redirects might be necessary.
A word of caution: there are some major implications to putting redirects in place including effects on your site's SEO. I recommend you read up on the different kinds of redirects and what they do.
Reading on the topic: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Redirections
I'm receiving strange emails can't stop them even using re-captcha in my site where it says they're comming from.
My answer to you is that you should redirect your question to https://wordpress.stackexchange.com
You're not giving us any information for your WordPress configuration to help determine what might be happening. I am guessing, but this looks like your form has been exploited. My suggestion would be to disable your forms to see if that stops the traffic. I also suggest you look at your WordPress configurations and disable comments or any other way someone can contact you, since that could be the other issue.
Good luck.
TL;DR Should I redirect from www.domain.tld to domain.tld or vice versa?
I am running a CMS that handles multiple domains. Until now the CMS is in charge of redirecting www.domain.tld to domain.tld or vice versa for each domain individually, but I've decided to let mod_rewrite handle that in the future for some reasons:
Performance: No need to fire up the CMS just to serve a http-redirect
Consistency: For "historical reasons", some domains do the redirect in one directions and some do it in the other direction. That's not a real problem, just gives me an itch.
Simplicity: Instead of having to worry about each domain individually, I'll have a solution for all existing and future(!) domains, even those that are not handled by the CMS.
I know how to implement that, but what I don't know is if there's a preferred "direction" of the redirect. I found very little information on that subject, but maybe I just searched for the wrong stuff. I remember having read somewhere (I believe at some page of Google's webmaster tools, but I can't find it right now), that it doesn't matter which one you choose as long as you stick to it.
Personally, I prefer domain.tld over www.domain.tld, that's how I type it in my browser, that's how I say it and that's how I write it, because I think that "www." is unnecessary garbage that looks bad, sounds bad, costs time (to read, to write or in a verbal conversation), space (in your address bar or when printed on paper) and bandwidth (I know, 4 bytes, but those 4 bytes accumulate).
But to be sure, I went to see how others do it and all the big "internet companies" (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon) as well as Apple and Microsoft redirect to www.domain.tld. Sites that cater to a more technical audience are split up: icann.org and w3.org redirect to the www version while for example jquery, github, stackoverflow redirect to the non-www version. In fact stack overflow's description of the 'no-www' tag says this:
The process of eliminating the usage of www to prefix URLs, for instance by redirecting users from http://www.example/ to http://example/. www is by many considered a dead and unnecessary practice.
So, are there any good reasons to prefer one over the other except the ones I already mentioned for getting rid of 'www.'? Or is it just a matter of personal taste and my findings are just a strange coincidence?
Side question
Not really a part of my current problem, but I noticed something intriguing and I'm curious: If there's https involved, most sites that I checked will handle it like this:
http://domain.tld -(301)-> https://domain.tld -(301)-> https://www.domain.tld
However Paypal uses a 301 only for the second redirect and 302 for the first and Apple (iCloud) does it with just one redirect:
http://icloud.com -(301)-> https://www.icloud.com
Can anyone think of a reason for doing this one way or the other?
OK, so apparently my research was sloppy and I posted this question on the wrong part of the vast stackexchange network.
If anyone should stumble upon this question, looking for some answers, I found all the answers and links to further materials on Webmasters:
Should I include “www” in my canonical URLs? What are the pros and cons?
and there's also a related thread on meta:
Why isn't stackoverflow using www in the URL?
I recently built and published my Wordpress site at www.kernelops.com and submitted it to the google index and webmaster tools. Today I logged into webmaster tools and found 60 URL errors all with the same type of issue. The base domain address www.kernelops.com is being appended to all my sites page, category, and post URLs. An example of the failed URL looks like this:
http://www.kernelops.com/blog/www.kernelops.com
Google Webmaster Tools indicates that this weird link is originating from the base url "http://www.kernelops.com/blog" which obviously means the issue is on my end. My Wordpress permalink settings are set to use the post-name; I'm not sure if that could be causing this, i.e.:
http://www.kernelops.com/sample-post/
I can't seem to find any help resolving this weird issue with google searches and thought someone here may be able to point me in the right direction.
The Wordpress plugins that would potentially affect the site's URLs are the following:
All in One SEO
XML-Sitemap
But I can't see any sort of setting within these plugins that would be causing this type of issue.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated - thanks in advance!
This is a long shot, but it may be happening if the Google crawler picks up a link that seems like a relative path and attempts to append it to the current directory. It's highly unlikely that Google would have such a bug, but it's not impossible either.
The closes thing I could find that may be considered a relative path is this:
<div class="copyright">
...
Kernel, Inc.
...
</div>
I doubt that this is the problem, but it may be worth fixing it.
Now, there is yet another possibility and that's if the website serves slightly different content depending on the User Agent string. When Google presents your website with a User Agent string, the SEO plugins detects it and tries to optimize things in order to improve your ranking (not familiar with that plugins, so I don't know what it does exactly). There may be a bug in the SEO plugin that will cause the www.kernelops.com URL to look like a relative path or to actually construct that faulty URL somehow.
You can possibly test this by setting the user-agent string in your browser (e.g. FireFox's user-agent switcher) to Googlebot's user-agent string and test what happens when you visit your website. Look at the page source that you receive and look for any links that might look like the one Google is finding.
However, if the SEO tool is smart enough, it will "realize" that your IP doesn't match one of the valid IPs for Googlebot and it will not make the modifications.
Whats the best recommended way yo hide my staging website from search engines, i Googled it and found some says that i should put a metatag, and some said that i should put a text file inside my website directory, i want to know the standard way.
my current website is in asp.net, while i believe that it must be a common way for any website whatever its programming language.
Use a robots.txt file.
see here http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
You could also use your servers robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Google's crawler actually respects these settings.
Really easy answer; password protect it. If it’s a staging site then it quite likely is not intended to be publicly facing (private audience only most likely). Trying to keep it out of search engines is only treating a symptom when the real problem is that you haven’t appropriately secured it.
Keep in mind that you can't hide a public-facing unprotected web site from a search engine. You can ask that bots not index it (through the robots.txt that my fine colleagues have brought up), and the people who write the bots may choose not to index your site based on that, but there's got to be at least one guy out there who is indexing all the things people ask him not to index. At the very least one.
If this is a big requirement, keeping automated crawlers out, some kind of CAPCHA solution might work for you.
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
There are search engines / book marking services which do not use robots.txt. If you really don't want it to turn up ever I'd suggest using capcha's just to navigate to the site.
Whats the best recommended way yo hide my staging website from search engines
Simple: don't make it public. If that doesn't work, then only make it public long enough to validate that it is ready to post live and then take it down.
However, all that said, a more fundamental question is, "Why care?". If the staging site is really supposed to be the live site one step before pushing live, then it shouldn't matter if it is indexed.