Spammy 404s: Should I Worry?
-
One of my sites is getting a ton of spammy 404s with porno-like URLs. All of these 404s are linked from other sites that I assume also got hacked, and when I click on them, they are also 404s.
So I'm assuming some spam site is tricking the Googlebot into thinking these URLs exist. But is this going to affect my site & SEO directly?
Is it worth disavowing all of the sites linking to me? Is Google even considering these real links? Did these pages ever actually exist anywhere?
Don't have a hacker-brain whatsoever so I need some enlightening.
I've been told I shouldn't worry but it seems like something I should worry about...Any help is greatly appreciated
(I've updated to the newest Wordpress and Sucuri).
-
The pages definitely don't exist anywhere.
Does this mean I have nothing to worry about?
-
There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.
Often those injected spam URLs are hidden using javascript. There's a Chrome plugin called Quick Javascript Switcher that will let you toggle JS on and off. Once it's off, if there are injected URLs on your site, you should be able to see them.
-
The first thing I recommend is to make sure that those are actually 404 errors on your site that the search engines (and regular users) can see. There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.
I would look in Google to see if those 404 pages on your site are indexed. Try a site:yourdomain.com search to see if they're indexed. Then, use a crawler to crawl your own website to see if the crawler can find those 404 pages.
Typically, when you see those errors, the site has been hacked and now they've been removed. Or, those pages are on your site but when you go to them they appear to be 404s. I recommend you investigate this further to make sure that the pages or the errors do not exist.
-
As to should you worry, we need more info. Of all the links you show in a tool like ahrefs or Majestic, what percentage are these links?
Can you pm me a sample of one or two of them? I will be happy to tell you what I think once I am clear on what they are. We also do a ton with WP so could probably give you some direction there. I am only saying PM so that you can disclose if you don't want to disclose in public. I am not going to in any way try to sell you on our services and if you wanted service I would refer you as I don't like people hawking through Moz Q&A.
Best -
Hi there
Has this been an ongoing issue and you are seeing more and more 404 links coming in? If so, Google has ways of notifying them on potentially spammy / hacked websites, so you could start there.
If it's something where these links are taking up a good portion of your backlink profile, I would do a quick audit and possibly disavow. This may take a bit of work, so if you're not comfortable, Moz has a great recommended companies list of agencies / consultants that will be more than happy to help.
Let me know if this helps or if you have any more questions! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
My site was hacked and spammy URLs were injected that pointed out. The issue was fixed, but GWT is still reporting more of these links.
Excuse me for posting this here, I wasn't having much luck going through GWT support. We recently moved our eCommerce site to a new server and in the process the site was hacked. Spammy URLs were injected in, all of which were pointing outwards to some spammy eCommerce retail stores. I removed ~4,000 of these links, but more continue to pile in. As you can see, there are now over 20,000 of these links. Note that our server support team does not see these links anywhere. I understand that Google doesn't generally view this as a problem. But is that true given my circumstance? I cannot imagine that 20,000 new, senseless 404's can be healthy for my website. If I can't get a good response here, would anyone know of a direct Google support email or number I can use for this issue?
Technical SEO | | jampaper0 -
1,300,000 404s
Just moved a WordProcess site over to a new host and skinned it. Found out after the fact that the site had been hacked - the db is clean. I did notice at first there were a lot of 404s being generated, so I setup a script to capture and then return a 410 page gone - and then the plan was to submit them to have them removed from the index - thinking there was a manageable number But, when I looked at Google WebMaster Tools there was over 1,300,000 404 errors - see attachment. My puny attempt to solve this problem seems to need more of an industrial size solution. My question, is that what would be the best way to deal with this? Not all of the pages are indexed in google - only 637 index but you can only see about 150 in the index. Where bing is another story saying that over 2,700 pages index but only can see about 200. How is this affecting any future rankings - they do not rank well, as I found out because of very slow page load speed and of course the hacks? The link profile looking at Google is OK, and there are no messages in Google Webmaster tools. am5cMz2
Technical SEO | | Runner20090 -
404s in GWT - Not sure how they are being found
We have been getting multiple 404 errors in GWT that look like this: http://www.example.com/UpdateCart. The problem is that this is not a URL that is part of our structure, it is only a piece. The actual URL has a query string on the end, so if you take the query string off, the page does not work. I can't figure out how Google is finding these pages. Could it be removing the query string? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Colbys0 -
Should I Use the Disavow Tool to for a Spammy Site/Landing Page?
Here's the situation... There's a site that is linking to about 6 articles of mine from about 225 pages of theirs (according to info in GWT). These pages are sales landing pages looking to sell their product. The pages are pretty much identical but have different urls. (I actually have a few sites doing this to me.) Here's where I think it's real bad -- when they are linking to me you don't see the link on the page, you have to view the page source and search for my site's url. I'm thinking having a hidden url, and it being my article that's hidden, has got to be bad. That on top of it being a sales page for a product I've seen traffic to my site dropping but I don't have a warning in GWT. These aren't links that I've placed or asked for in any way. I don't see how they could be good for me and I've already done what I could to email the site to remove the links (I didn't think it would work but thought I'd at least try). I totally understand that the site linking to me may not have any affect on my current traffic. So should I use the Disavow tool to make sure this site isn't counting against me?
Technical SEO | | GlenCraig0 -
Site dropped after I removed spammy KW-stuffed section from homepage
An SEO newbie. I took a sabbatical from my site for 10 months for personal reasons & I'm now coming back to it for the first time and facing a number of issues that I'd appreciate some advice on. 1) In the past week, my rankings for my main keywords have suddenly plummeted from ~#7 - #8 to about #25. The only thing I've done in that time is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and clean up a spammy-looking keyword-stuffed section at the foot of my homepage. (It read: Red keyword | blue keyword | green keyword | yellow keyword ... 20 times). I've kept the links (to internal pages of my site) but removed keywords. I've no social presence whatsoever. No Twitter, Facebook, Digg, G+, Google Places, nothing -- but I can't imagine this is behind the sudden drop. 2) Last year my rankings start to fall in late April. But for the first two months or so the drop was only from #1 to #2 - #3. I put it down to Penguin as my backlink profile is not ideal. About 5 years ago some SEO got me a mass of sitewide blog footer links with exact-match anchors -- some of which still remain. (Some domains have 750-plus links pointing back to my site). I've a sitewide banner (2,500 pages) on a site with a related theme to mine. I've loads of links from article directory sites (from when I knew no better). * Question: In Google Webmaster Tools I have not (yet?) received an unnatural links warning. Should I still clean up the links with the Link Disavow tool?
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Google WMT continues reporting fixed 404s - why?
I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring. This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc. Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them. By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back. The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors. The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere. Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again? Thanks -Juanita
Technical SEO | | VoxxiVoxxi0 -
Webmaster Tools 404s
We try to keep our 404s in google webmaster tools to a minimum but in recent months, the volume has simply exploded to over 500k errors. 99.95% of this is complete spam linking to pages that never existed. Have tried marking as resolved but they just end up back in the list eventually and don't like the idea of 301ing so many links when the pages never existed in the first place. We can just ignore them all but this makes it hard to identify legitimate 404s that need redirecting as there is only so much data we can export out of WT. Has anyone had experience with returning 410s? Does google eventually drop these from WT?
Technical SEO | | jandunlop0 -
Does Selling the Same Product on Different Domains Look Spammy?
Today, I have watched such a great video on YouTube from Google Webmaster Help with following subject. Does selling the same product on three different domains look spammy? Now, I have same issue with my three websites. You can find out details as follow. Traditional Table Lamp in Brushed Steel Finsih with Green Glass http://www.lampslightingandmore.com/50_63_21594/traditional-table-lamp-in-brushed-steel-finsih-with-green-glass.html http://www.vistastores.com/indoorlighting-roycelighting-rtl50091-12b.html 7.5' Patio Umbrella Push Tilt - Olefinhttp://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.htmlhttp://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.htmlThere are three different website with 4000+ same products, same Title tag, same Meta description, same price, same details, same SKU number, same images and same details.There are very few pages indexed by Google for VistaStores.com. [I have submitted series of question on SEOmoz Q & A forum to resolve my website's crawling issue.]I assume that, this is one of biggest reason to stop my crawling. So, How can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0