“Warning: This is English Domain”… Atoall.com. What the heck?

by Matt Burgess on September 28, 2009

So, recently I was looking through my Google Webmaster Tools account (which you really should be using you know, if you want to learn more about how Google views your site), and came across an interesting URL in my “404s” list. I’ve blanked out the name of my domain, but the URL that threw up the 404 was as follows:

http://www.xxxxxxx.com/warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html

Now, this concerned me… because I had never, never heard of this URL on my site before. Where the heck would that have come from? So I went and started doing some searches… and this is what I found:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site
_in_atoall.com.html%22&pws=0&hl=en&num=10

englishdomain

So, to me, there are some warning flags being thrown up here. There are over 15,000 indexed pages showing up with that URL string. And something about that simply doesn’t sound right.

I threw this out on Twitter last night, and the always helpful Angie (@AngsCopywriting) pointed out to me that if you looked at the Google cache of the site “SpeedTV.com” (one of the sites effected) and scroll to the bottom, you can see a link containing the offending anomaly (click to see larger image)…

engdomain3

Also, if you go to the site mentioned in the URL (Atoall.com), you can see that it looks… well, less than savoury. Actually, you know, I was going to just nofollow the link to it, but I’d rather not even go that far… I’ll just paste the address here in plain text: http://atoall.com/New.html… up to you whether you visit or not. That page is SFW, but I can’t guarantee the same for the rest of the site, especially with links like “Hot Girls Pics” and “Hot Cute Boy Images” linked off of that page. Use your own discretion.

So, here’s my question: Have you checked into your Google Webmaster Tools account recently? Seen anything suspicious like this showing up? I know of at least one other friend who has had the same 404 show up on his site, so I’m thinking there’s a good chance if you’re reading this, you might have found it looking for answers to the strange “Atoall.com” query. If you have had experience with it, please share your insights below. All I know is… something doesn’t smell right here.

  • Sukhwinderbhandal

    yes

  • Sukhwinderbhandal

    translate

  • Frank C. Tannehill

    Google Webmaster tools has been showing me more indexed pages than I though I had so I'll take a closer look and search to see if there's any "Atoall" in there somewhere. Thanks for pointing out this problem and its fix.
    __________
    Frank C. Tannehill
    domain name

  • abc

    rejults in google 353000

  • Hi Matt
    This isn't a hack on your website, rather it's some other website which is linking to that URL on your website. Since your site returns a proper 404 HTTP result code, this URL is unlikely to get indexed. The other sites which are getting indexed like that are most likely not returning the proper HTTP result code, which is why those URLs are getting indexed.
    Cheers, John

  • Hi John,
    Thanks for popping by with your insights! I was actually careful to avoid using the "hacking" term in this post, as I didn't think this would be a "hacking" per se :) Still, something very strange seems to be up with this atoall site, no?

  • Lots of sites use URL rewriting which can make this content appear on the page (and which is ... generally a bad idea because of that). For instance, take the second site listed in the query you linked (xcomment) and use anything directly after the domain name. You will see that this content is shown on the page multiple times. Sites like these are open for all sorts of problems (eg. XSS) if they show exactly what is added in the URL... so this is really something the site owner should fix. (Or again, just return 404 for invalid URLs like your site does :-))

  • Woot, score one for my site doing the right thing!
    Still can't figure out what the point is for that site to be linking to 10s of 1000s of non-existent pages on other domains though, but appreciate you stopping by to clarify John :)

  • Hi Matt!! I'm experiencing this same thing. Actually my site is in the "Domain in Red Zone . . "... I don't have any idea what that means!! Could you find out what is the purpose of this site or this people creating no-existing links of other pages?? Thanks!

  • Hi there, sorry for the long time between replies! Unfortunately I havent looked into this since the original post and John's above comments. I figured if something shady was up, Google would take some kind of action (seeing as John's an employee of Google), but I've seen no change in the serps for atoall.com. To be quite honest, it wasn't worth the effort to keep investigating once John stopped by :)

  • I've looked at this with several people and I have to respectfully disagree for two reasons:

    First of all, the text is appearing directly ON the page, which you can see http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:lQJlR6lEpk4J:www.speedtv.com/w...[warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html]&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au

    Secondly, these are NOT 404s. These are actual pages: http://www.google.ca/search?hl...

  • bishijo

    I m viewing the atoall.com as per your coment. i am found other link for this website. http://atoall.org/

    & i think the atoall.org provides angle theory as per atoall.org

    visit this link http://keyboard-shortcuts-keys...

    I have concluson that any one can surf internet easily as per atoall

    found no. of shortcuts for the domain http://keyboard-shortcuts-keys...

    for gghhjj.com can open google.com, mmjjuu.com can open microsoft website.

    i have found gghhjj.com is on keyboard in one sequence, and he can provide no. of sequences
    and atoall says this is angle theory

    So, Mr. Matt Burgess plz you can read every thing and tell me whats the hecking.

  • @bishijo... let me guess, you're connected with atoall? Full disclosure now... ;)

  • Hi Matt, yes, it was actually another friend of mine who had thought to check the cache of the websites...very scary indeed. It's just a good thing you were paying attention! I'm really shocked that so many big websites have been hacked and don't know it! 15K? Yikes!

blog comments powered by Disqus