About how Yandex "set us up"

Hello! I want to tell you a story about the attack on our site, only this is not a DDOS attack, but a whole insanity attack. In the end, everything turned out well, but for now read the preamble.

It so happened that I was working on a new version of one old project in RuNet, our task is to test IT specialists. One fine day, very strange letters began to fall, people raved about VKontakte, that we were deceiving them and bastards in general. :) They laughed and forgotten, there are few schizo.

Time passed and we made a new version and launched it on a new server, but still, as it turned out, one problem was not solved. Its essence is in the registration of new users, to non-existent email addresses, and this is quite a large number of people. We used to think that these were bots, but the captcha was replaced on the new site, and the flow of left registrations did not stop for a second.
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Began to dig deeper. First of all, I added a message in front of the form with the registration as follows: “Attention! By specifying a non-existent mailbox, you will not be able to activate your account, and therefore enter, so be careful. ”But this didn’t yield any results and we continued to puzzle further, who is this? where and why?

Then it was decided to log the referrers of these strange users, here we are lucky! The requests came from Yandex search results and other small search engines that use Yandex results. And then, oh gods, one of the requests was “check in contact”. I went to the search engine entered this request and saw our site with a link to our registration in second place, after the very VKontakte. Now we have become clear letters of such content :)

“I THINK THAT SUCH TESTS ARE NECESSARY FOR SPECIFIC PEOPLE WHO ARE ENGAGED IN BUSINESS, AND I WANT TO COMMUNICATE JUST WITH PEOPLE WITHOUT ANY FAD! FIND FRIENDS IN INTERESTS! WHO WANTS TO BE TESTED - START, AND YOU DO NOT ALLOCATE THIS TESTING FOR ALL. IF IT IS NECESSARY TO BE TESTED IT IS NECESSARY - IT IS NECESSARY TO PRESENT THIS CONDITION IN REGISTRATION! „

Ie people were looking for VKontakte, despite the link they clicked like “Registration” robots and registered with us :) By the way, you need to specify a lot of information for registration, from the name to the residential address, which, however, did not stop anyone. Immediately after that, the decision was made to parse the referrers in which Yandex kept requests for comfort, if there were such requests like “registration to contact”, “contacts.ru registration” and others, then we send such users to a special page

This of course helped, but there are also particularly stubborn ones, which, judging by the referrers' logs, crawl through this stub:



A little later, it was discovered that they register with us and according to the requests of “mail.ru registration”, it’s good though they don’t give us the second position, they also put a stub with a warning.

Conclusion: you need to be careful with SEO, otherwise you can attract such an audience that even a whole headquarters of support will not help. Even on the simplest interface there is a stupid one and it will confuse everything.

PS In the comments I will be glad to hear your stories about users, our friends have passed IT tests for the sake of friends :)