Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Malicious site pointed A-Record to my IP, Google Indexed
-
Hello All,
I launched my site on May 1 and as it turns out, another domain was pointing it's A-Record to my IP. This site is coming up as malicious, but worst of all, it's ranking on keywords for my business objectives with my content and metadata, therefore I'm losing traffic.
I've had the domain host remove the incorrect A-Record and I've submitted numerous malware reports to Google, and attempted to request removal of this site from the index. I've resubmitted my sitemap, but it seems as though this offending domain is still being indexed more thoroughly than my legitimate domain.
Can anyone offer any advice? Anything would be greatly appreciated!
Best regards,
Doug
-
Yes, sorry, Fetch as Google: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158587
-
Thanks Cyrus. Do you mean Fetch as Google? I'm not too familiar with that specific tool.
Just in case someone runs into the same issue that I've encountered, I'll include my final steps in remedying this problem (hopefully).
I was finally able to contact the webmaster of the other domain who agreed to take down the site. I contacted GoDaddy to confirm her site was down, since I wasn't risking getting my machine infected with malware. Next I went to Webmaster Tools and requested content removal, page by page until all of the bad URLs were submitted.
In my frustration and possibly paranoia, I've also had to battle with GoDaddy to get a new dedicated IP address since I believe this IP could now be "tainted" or flagged as a malicious or spammy.
Cyrus, you couldn't be more accurate. Extremely tough to wait out. Hopefully this will help someone out down the road.
Thanks again.
-
Hi Edward,
You might have already done this, but:
1. Crawl as Googlebot to your homepage - submit all pages and all linked pages to index.
2. You said you submitted your sitemap. Submit it again.
3. Hopefully this will resolve in a couple weeks. Tough to wait it out.
-
Nope, it doesn't. I guess it's just a waiting game at this point. Thank you again.
-
Does it still resolve to your site? If not, it should fall off as Google spiders it again.
-
Thank you! This will prevent future issues, but in terms of the other domain pulling rank on mine, is that something I need to wait out since I have no control? Is there any way to have it removed?
-
Your htaccess file can do the 301 (it's actually a config file you can control). Here's some sample code that should do the trick.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
Thanks for your reply! It's hosted with GoDaddy on their Economy package. I believe it's shared hosting.
With that being said, unfortunately I don't have access to the server config. How would I go about implementing a 301 redirect for the other domain or even better a 404?
I absolutely agree about modifying the htaccess. As it stands now, I've hacked it together, but I'll see if I can find out how to do what you're suggesting.
I appreciate your feedback so far.
Best regards
-
That sounds like a bad web server config. Most servers run a virtual host, meaning the URL determines what website is served up. Either you have your own virtual dedicated server and only one site that isn't using vhost, or your host has set your website up as the default site.
If you have control over the web server config, I would add the malicious site to the config as a hosted site and then have it return a 404. That should de-index it.
If you don't have that level of control, try to get a 301 redirect for the bad domain. You really need something like an htaccess that says if a site is accessing my website as anything but www.mydomain.com it needs to 301 to that URL. Otherwise anyone in the world can hijack your site the way it's set up now. Just point another A record and instant duplicate content headaches.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
How to get content to index faster in Google.....pubsubhubbub?
I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
XML Sitemap Index Percentage (Large Sites)
Hi all I'm wanting to find out from those who have experience dealing with large sites (10s/100s of millions of pages). What's a typical (or highest) percentage of indexed pages vs. submitted pages you've seen? This information can be found in webmaster tools where Google shows you the pages submitted & indexed for each of your sitemap. I'm trying to figure out whether, The average index % out there There is a ceiling (i.e. will never reach 100%) It's possible to improve the indexing percentage further Just to give you some background, sitemap index files (according to schema.org) have been implemented to improve crawl efficiency and I'm wanting to find out other ways to improve this further. I've been thinking about looking at the URL parameters to exclude as there are hundreds (e-commerce site) to help Google improve crawl efficiency and utilise the daily crawl quote more effectively to discover pages that have not been discovered yet. However, I'm not sure yet whether this is the best path to take or I'm just flogging a dead horse if there is such a ceiling or if I'm already at the average ballpark for large sites. Any suggestions/insights would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danng0 -
Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?
We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0 -
Getting Google to Correct a Misspelled Site Link...Help!
My company website recently got its site links in google search... WooHoo! However, when you type TECHeGO into Google Search one of the links is spelled incorrectly. Instead of 'CONversion Optimization' its 'COversion Optimization'. At first I thought there was a misspelling on that page somewhere but there is not and have come to the conclusion that Google has made a mistake. I know that I can block the page in webmaster tools (No Thanks) but how in the crap can I get them to correct the spelling when no one really knows how to get them to appear in the first place? Riddle Me That Folks! sitelink.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TECHeGO0