Strange activity on a domain

General Web Dev
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I have a strange situation with one of my domains. It has been redirecting to another website since March and there are no pages on the domain except an .htaccess file and an index.php. (I’ve since removed the .htaccess and added a robots.txt file).

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a lot of activity on the domain and found that Google, other bots, as well as other visitors were looking for weirdly named pages (that of course don’t exist).

The image below (from my stats) shows some of the pages that are being looked for this month. There are currently 3,500 404s in June.

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I don’t understand why Google et al seem to think these pages exist. Is it possible for someone to add made-up content to Google’s index? But to what end?

This content has never existed on the domain. I keep an eye out for unusual activity and would have spotted if there had been malware on the site before I deleted all content in February.

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That looks very like the kind of links I saw on one of my sites after it had been hacked.

I’m guessing here, but I wonder if it’s possible that somebody attempted the hack and failed, but had already set links to the content they intended to add? (After all, what good is the hacked content if nobody can reach it?)

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These links look like for a dodgy movie streaming spanish site

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I’ve noticed that it seems to be mainly South American Google bots that are visiting. I added the robots.txt to see if they are real or spoofed.

I guess they will get fed-up of looking for non-existent content eventually.

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