What the Heck is This???

chuckinsocal

While browsing my StatCounter logs I found http://www.socalimages.com/?q=http://www.evilaliv3.org/ as a page visited. When I plug that into my address bar I go to my home page.

When I plug http://www.evilaliv3.org/ into my address bar I go here.

The owner of this URL has two other sites: http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eush%2Eit&urlhash=5yja and http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eisgroup%2Eit&urlhash=Ct3o. His LinkedIn page is at http://www.linkedin.com/profile?authToken=b8UB&viewProfile=&authType=name&locale=en_US&key=47363805

This strange URL was found at the bottom of a list of 120 pages visited by the City of Carlsbad CA which makes absolutely no sense.

So, the question is: Am I being hacked or is this harmless? Or, maybe the City of Carlsbad is being hacked? I looks a little scary to me.

I'll be happy to provide privately my log in info to StatCounter if it would help someone to take a closer look.

Thanks.

Edit: When I went to the referring link, here's what I found:


How or why would Google append that URL to my URL?

Photometric

It looks like a redirect from your site the evilaliv.org site

http://www.hutteman.com/weblog/2006/05/05-249.html

This is normal for stuff on Google, they clean it up usually. I think there's a place to email the problem url to google and they take care of it.

If it helps, I just googled your name, your site (cleanurl) appears in google. The appended parameter isn't there. I cannot find an instance of the URL with the redirect appended to it. Sometimes spammers send out urls' in email form. Part of being on the www unfortunately.

jfriend

If StatCounter recorded http://www.socalimages.com/?q=http://www.evilaliv3.org/, then someone probably hit your site with that URL. As you can see when you go to that link, it displays your homepage. Why was that there? Who knows. It's nothing harmful. It means nothing. There can be anything after the ? mark on the end of your URL and it will still go to your homepage.

You can see the same thing with someone else's page like:

http://www.yahoo.com/?q=http://www.evilaliv3.org/

Google put that URL in a search result because it found that link on the web so it indexed it. The only open question here is why did someone put that link on the web? It's 100% harmless.

chuckinsocal

Thanks to both you guys for your responses.

The search term used in Google was Carrillo Ranch. In the result for my site, the blue link takes you to my Carrillo Ranch gallery as expected. But, the green link with the appended URL takes you to my home page .

If you guys say it's harmless then it's harmless. But I can't help wondering how it got there. It just seems weird to me, but then again, I guess the interweb sometimes does weird things.

Thanks again for your help.