redirect-to - porn spam! vB3

[GrantHorizons]

Somewhere, somehow, there are over 100 "redirect-to" porn spam links on my site (500,000+ posts). We moderate carefully, but obviously don't see everything.

To clarify - somewhere - I believe - there is an innocuous word that is a link, and vB3 automatically makes a "redirect-to" link of it. Times 100 or so...

So, I clearly need to find them! However, google search - that I use for search - only finds the redirect - but doesn't show me what page the link is ON. Forum search finds nothing at all.

Anyone have any ideas how to find them?
Note that MySQL is not my forte.

Thanks for any ideas, and I hope everyone had a great Christmas, and best wishes for a happy and healthy 2022!

[z3r0]

I'm pretty sure "redirect-to" is part of dbseo's features for external links and it causes loads of search engine spam links from your site, in the newer versions you can turn it off.


Edit
here is the setting
Attachment 158907

[GrantHorizons]

Thanks, good to know!
Still have to find the links, delete and ban the scumbag user.

--------------- Added [DATE]1640842083[/DATE] at [TIME]1640842083[/TIME] ---------------

If anyone has an idea on how to find a "hidden" link, please enlighten me!
The link could be any word in the forum, linked to porn.
thanks!

[z3r0]

The links may not even be on your site, I've just looked back on my ticket to dbseo on the issue back in 2016 and the "redirect-to" system creates an open redirect from any site it's enabled on - I did report it back then but they didn't do anything about it.

links like the following could be listed anywhere on the net and get indexed as from your site.

https://www.yourforumurl.com/redirect-to/?redirect=https://www.somepornsite.zzz/

You need to disable the feature and block /redirect-to/ in your htaccess and add a disallow in your robots.txt

[GrantHorizons]

That's... terrifying.

Thank you! Turned off. And done!

Help much appreciated, have a great 2022!.

[z3r0]

I've just checked your site and the links in Google and I think I would do more, all the porn links now resolve to an "Invalid Forum specified" page on your site, if that was mine I wouldn't like that and I'd go for a hard 404 via htaccess.

I use Windows servers and know nothing about apache and htaccess, but I've found a thread at dragonbyte where somebody shows how to do it - https://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/thre...l-links.24453/

Also I'd look at the Google webmaster Tools removals tool and see if I could de-index them - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846

[GrantHorizons]

Excellent info, thanks a BUNCH!
And I agree, didn't like the error, but only got so far with it. On it again today!
thanks again

--------------- Added 31 Dec 21 at 23:03 ---------------

Removed the /redirect-to from google, it's "processing", and tried the dragonbytes code suggestion, no change.

RedirectMatch 404 ^/redirect-to/.*$

Tried in a couple of different positions in my htaccess and no change. Came to the conclusion that I actually don't care - if someone clicks one of those, that's ok - it is essentially a 404.

[GrantHorizons]

FYI for those with the same issue:
All looking good now, google has cleaned up and no problems visible anywhere.
Kudos to @z3r0!