Domain registered to Google redirected with a 302

[Marcia]

Slight misspellings of domain names for popular destinations can be used to gain type-in traffic, raise Alexa rankings for hits and pageviews, and possibly gain some backlinks from typos.

Something like spelling ww.wgoogle.com instead of www.google.com by mistake could do it. Apparently Google foresaw the possibility of that happening, so they own wgoogle.com

Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-1300002)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US

Domain Name: wgoogle.com

Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571

Created on..............: 2000-Jul-05.
Expires on..............: 2007-Jul-05.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Sep-06 08:58:03.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.WESPEAKJIVE.COM
NS2.WESPEAKJIVE.COM

MarkMonitor.com - The Leader in Corporate Domain Management

But oh my goodness, if we go to the domain it's redirected to another site with a temporary 302 redirection:

Server Response: http://www.wgoogle.com
Status: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:35:41 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux)
Accept-Ranges: bytes
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.2.2
Location: http://www.example.com/index_rdrct_target.shtml
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

It's kind of interesting how inventive and creative people can be, isn't it?

[rustybrick]

Interesting find, did you happen to type into your browser ww.wgoogle.com?

[Marcia]

I did click on it - very interesting. I also checked the whois and the backlinks for the domain itself. It's fascinating, isn't it?

I do wonder though, whether it was someone on the inside at Google or at the registrar's who did that. And how about Google's 302 "bug"? Google should take variations for domains for all their properties, it can't be an isolated case.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

The domain is not doing server side redirect when I check it. I get a HTTP/1.1 200 OK. But it gets a bit more strange than this ...

Is Google spamming?

Try and look at the content of the domain - you can do that by typing in this URL in your IE browser:
view-source:http://www.wgoogle.com


What you get is a spammy doorway page. I have removed the JavaScript redirect so you can se a copy of the crap from one of my servers:
http://www.geekbrowser.com/test/index.html


The site I am being redirected to, and the one promoted in this doorway page is: www.mysportsbook.com/ - a site that gives me multiple pop-ups and dirt of all kinds.

Is Google really operating sites like this?
Notice this: "WGOOGLE.COM, The Global Leader In Sports Gaming Information"

[I, Brian]

It would certainly be interesting if Google as a company, or it's employees, were involved in doorways.

However, have you considered the possibility that somebody is simply using false WHOIS registration info?

Whenever I've checked Google WHOIS info, Google have invariably used "alldomains.com" for their .com registrations, and the domains hosted on nameservers ns1-4 Google.com.

The fact that this domain is attributed to a different registrar and using non-Google nameservers, makes the registration info suspect, IMO.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

You are right, it is suspect but I just don't understand how they could update the records on sep 5, with a e-mail adress: dns-admin@google.com unless they where actually working inside Google - with or without Google management knowing about it.

Anyway, if this is in fact nothing but abuse of Googles name, then I would expect them to step up and say so - and go after the abusers. Where are Google? Do you think we need to send this to the press to get them to respond? :)