I've been running an insurance web site for a year. I mainly do article marketing on insurance topics and SEO. I do not spam or use any shady or irrelevent seo techniques. In my stats'I've always had relevent search queries -- car insurance, home insurance, etc. until today. Suddenly there are no insurance related queries and they are all irrelevant -- golf equipment, free, used cars, com, -- weird stuff like that. Does anyone have any ideas of what's going on. Is this some sort of hijacking? I sent an e-mail to my hosting company but they said everything looked normal. I appreciate any insight.

It isn't normal. I once had that happen and it was because of an A-name error on the part of the hosting company.

If the host can't figure it out, move the site.

No, it's a C-name issue. At any rate, it's a server misconfiguration on shared hosting, and when that happens it's showing search terms for sites belonging to other sites hosted there. When it happened to me, it also sent a Yahoo crawler into an endless loop.

Thank you Marcia, I've sent a question back to the hosting company about the C-Name error. However, does that just affect stats or am I actually getting irrelevant traffic? The reason I ask is I have an affiliate link on the site and traffic to that has dropped from several hits a day to zero.

A couple of other things to note in the last couple of weeks, that I don't know if they had an affect:

1)I redirected www.example.com to example.com

2) I blocked a site from accessing my site. It showed up a few weeks ago in the log, www.outfoxer.com. When you type it in, it brings you to a Page not found. When you google it, it brings up a bunch of server logs for various sites. Just seemed suspicious.

Scott

1)I redirected www.example.com to example.comThat wouldn't cause the problems you're experiencing.

2) I blocked a site from accessing my site. It showed up a few weeks ago in the log, www.outfoxer.com. When you type it in, it brings you to a Page not found. When you google it, it brings up a bunch of server logs for various sites. Just seemed suspicious. That sounds like plain, old-fashioned log spamming, but you might want to check to make sure there isn't a hijack going on

What comes up at Google if you do a search for your site using:
site:example.com
and
inurl:example.com

Log spamming? Geez, I'm learning something new and insidious about this business everyday. All of the referring sites are some sort of search engine, like Yahoo search Italy, or Google Hong Kong, Aol, etc. So maybe it is. I guess I need to figure out how to block my stats from the public?

When I do inurl:url.com I get my home page and one other page. When I do site:url.com I get 26 pages indexed of my site. If I had a hijack it would probably show up here right?

My hosting company insists it is not a C-name issue.

I'll keep doing some research. I appreciate your advice.