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Mendez628

: Googlebot spamming? We run a sailing website and offer measurement forms for sails and what not -- recently we've been getting hit with hundreds of form submissions with random letters and names

@Mendez628

Posted in: #Googlebot #Hacking #Spam

We run a sailing website and offer measurement forms for sails and what not -- recently we've been getting hit with hundreds of form submissions with random letters and names in the blanks and it's causing a massive headache! We tracked down to see if it was a certain bot or someone just trolling us but we tracked it down to a user with the ISP Googlebot and the IP is 66.249.66.### --

We recently did a bunch of 301 redirects and then reverted on those, and maybe that's what's causing Googlebot to be confused?

The measurement forms require an email to submit and we're getting random email addresses in the forms: screenshot for example --





Is our site compromised with a hack that's spamming Googlebot or is it just a mistake on our end? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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@Smith883

That is a spambot filling out your form. Such bots scrape the web looking for forms to fill out and will fill any input elements with random junk.

You can get around that by using a "honeypot" that will catch any forms filled out that include a hidden input element that only bots would see. You would need to write code to reject such forms.

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