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Occasionally I'll notice a link within a question/answer/comment that might have been legitimately mistyped, however, I'm thinking this might not always be the case.

If not paying careful attention it's very easy to click on a link without fully knowing what you are clicking on. In one such incident there was a link to what appeared to be the main url to stackoverflow.com, although after closer examination it was missing the l.

Since it appears the owners of the typo domain are using it in a malicious manner there is no mistake that it's something that should be avoided, and I've subsequently reported it to google. I would recommend the owners of stackoverflow.com report it as well.

How should one deal with such things internally (on stackoverflow.com) and externally (mistyping stackoverflow.com in the address bar and ending up on a malicous website)?

*I've not used the typo name anywhere in this question, for I don't think it should be advertised, or crawled.

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I used the url search option and only found one occurence of the mistyped domain you mentioned and fixed that one.

Here are the basic steps for dealing with links in posts:

  • Links that are clearly spam on either questions or answers: Flag as spam
    • Spammy answers often appear on recommendation questions. Those questions should be closed as well.
  • Links that are dead, either
    • leave a comment for the OP to fix the link
    • find the new location of the content and edit the link (and fix everything else while you edit)
    • find the broken location in the Internet Archive wayback machine and link to that
    • Downvote if none of the above leads to success
  • Answers that only say Look here should be flagged as Not An Answer (and downvoted)
  • Clearly mistyped links should be searched for multiple occurences and fixed with edits. You might want to ask for help by posting on the specific site meta if the number of posts turns out to be huge.

There had been a specific review queue for broken links but that only lived for a short period. Your example would not have popped in that queue but I mention it here for completeness.

If you find a site that clones content follow the procedure for scrapers.

For close-match domain names only there is not much we or SE can do because registering a domainname is not forbidden. If we get rid of the links to those domains quickly we at least guarantee that they don't get revenue from the ads they show.

tl;dr
Handling dead/broken/spammy or wrong links is a community effort and the responsibility of each user stumbling upon them

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