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.
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.
-
If the urls follow any particular pattern then you can use a htaccess redirect and return the header code 410 / 403 / 404 to Google. (I suggest 410) They will soon drop out of the index.
I don't know the exact .htaccess syntax off the top of my head but it will be something like this:
If they all come from the same folder then it would look something like this:
RedirectMatch 410 ^/folder/.*$If they have a common character string after the forward slash (such as xyz) then it would look something like this:
RedirectMatch 410 ^/xyz.*$If they have any common character string footprints at all (such as xyz) then it would look something like this (now I'm guessing):
RedirectMatch 410 ^/()xyz.$This would be a pretty easy fix if all of those spammy urls have any common characters after the forward slash or they all originate from a certain folder.
-
You might get a little quicker removal if you send them with a 410 status code. That will let Google know that the page is gone for good. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes
-
No problem at all! These new URLs do not actually exist on the website. Since we cleaned up the malicious code all of these URLs redirect to our 404 page.
-
Sorry to misunderstand the problem. Do those new urls actually exist on your site or just in search?
-
Hi 94501,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Just to be clear, we are not submitting multiple removals for the same URL and I don't think Google WMT even allows you to do that. Completely new URLs are appearing each day after removing the older ones.
My main concern is having spammy URLs indexed and associated with my website and the negative effects it can have from an SEO perspective.
-
Hi Pete,
It sounds like you've done what you can. I wouldn't submit multiple removals for the same url.
I assume it's out of your site map and you're not still being hacked and have figured out how it happened and taken steps to fix it.
Google will eventually figure it out. I'd try to move on to new stuff.
Best... Mike
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
-
Does google ignore ? in url?
Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google. It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index. I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Include Cross Domain Canonical URL's in Sitemap - Yes or No?
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed. On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WEB-IRS0 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0