Strange Redirects

[WorldBusiness]

Hi,

I'm in the US but today I've noticed a large number of visits coming from the UK landing on a specific article posted on my website. Many of the visits are using Google SSL United Kingdom, and because they're signed into their Google account I can't see what keywords are used to arrive at my article.

But one visit was performed without being signed in, so I clicked the referring link and got a list of searches in Google UK of which my article ranked number 1. But when I clicked on the link to my article it RE-DIRECTED to another website which is located in the US which has an article on the same topic. I tried again and that time the click delivered me to my article. However, on a third test it again re-directed to that other website.

I have a couple of questions about it:

1. How can this happen?
2. How can I contact Google directly to inform them of this?

I haven't received any messages from Google regarding possible malware links but in light of the penguin algo, competition has become even more fierce and black hat operators have been spamming my business email box and making visits to my website much more frequently in the past few weeks.

A little more info: My site has PR 4 and receives links and links to PR 7 and higher websites, many of the visits the past several weeks have landed on two key pages of my website: 1.) About Us page which talks about several of the websites with whom I have been working including linking to and receiving links from e.g. US government health agencies and private health sites and charities all of which are PR 7 and higher; 2.) my Link Partners page.

Often times this is followed by spam messages asking me to link to such and such website (at least two used gmail while claiming to be working for companies that do NOT have gmail addresses).

Is there a way to protect against these black hat tactics?

Thanks

[AussieWebmaster]

you can't avoid people asking for links especially as the page mentions link partners

the other thing could be caused by many things - what is the search term? also where are you hosting? have you checked your server for hacking?

[WorldBusiness]

Hi AussieWebmaster,

I'll respond to each of your questions:

1.) I don't mind getting link requests, I do link to many websites that are in my niche but these requests are often coming from cloaked sites.

2.) I didn't mention the search term the first time around because I wasn't sure if Search Engine Watch permitted it but here are three of the search phrases used in Google AND even AOL UK:

is alternate day fasting safe (varies between rank 1 to rank 7)

alternate day fasting intensive exercise (rank) #1

alternate day fasting safe #1

3.) I'm hosted by TypePad, I just asked them about this matter.

4.) I'm running a malware scan at this moment, thus far they haven't produced anything yet.

BUT I will say this, early this morning a screenshot generator spent 10 hours (yes, 10 hours) on my website. I'm unfamiliar with screenshot generators and did a Bing online search and came across a website that says it has software to copy content from remote website and remove their code. That's GOT to be a black hat site, perhaps that has something to do with these visits?

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this thread, so any help is appreciated. I've been operating my website since 2007 and want it to be a useful place for people who want to visit a family friendly health and wellness website.

[WorldBusiness]

This morning I conducted an extensive malware scan which detected three trojans on my computer. Obviously they attack Frirefox and IE browsers. I did an online search for redirects and found information on a Google redirect virus that has been operating since at least October 2010, the virus redirects traffic to the attacker's website(s). I'm confident that is what happened in my case as the troll visits have continued up to early this morning US time.

[bhartzer]

Although the malware might be on your computer, it may not be the answer to your question of why you're seeing traffic to your site. You may want to use a server header check to see exactly what's going on. Or install the 'live headers" tool in Firefox to see what URLs are redirecting to which sites--to determine who and where the redirects are happening.