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
-
404s on subfolder - how to redirect?
Hi all,
Technical SEO | | MFSMarketing
we have a lot of 404s to subfolders. Eg
www.website.com/blog-post-title/imagename/
www.website.com/blog-post-title/author/ We don't have these subfolders or blog posts anymore.
How do i redirect them? These links (404s) don't seem to have any value or backlinks. Thanks,
Stef0 -
Surge in spammy links
Hi, Our website www.foodjet.com has recently seen a huge amount of spammy incoming links to non-exisiting URLS:
Technical SEO | | FoodJEtThey all target pages that lead to a 404 and which clearly do not exist on our website. Since they have started to appear our DA has plummeted. I have already disavowed some domains, but more re-appear just as fast. I have also checked if our site has been hacked, which does not seem to be the case. What am I missing? And/or what can I do?
0 -
Dealing with broken internal links/404s. What's best practice?
I've just started working on a website that has generated lots (100s) of broken internal links. Essentially specific pages have been removed over time and nobody has been keeping an eye on what internal links might have been affected. Most of these are internal links that are embedded in content which hasn't been updated following the page's deletion. What's my best way to approach fixing these broken links? My plan is currently to redirect where appropriate (from a specific service page that doesn't exist to the overall service category maybe?) but there are lots of pages that don't have a similar or equivalent page. I presume I'll need to go through the content removing the links or replacing them where possible. My example is a specific staff member who no longer works there and is linked to from a category page, should i be redirecting from the old staff member and updating the anchor text, or just straight up replacing the whole thing to link to the right person? In most cases, these pages don't rank and I can't think of many that have any external websites linking to them. I'm over thinking all of this? Please help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Adam_SEO_Learning0 -
Huge uptick in 404s on new website
I just launched a new website, and I see that the 404s shot up hugely in Google Webmaster Tools right during the launch. We went from Drupal to WordPress, but I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether these 404s represent a crisis, or potentially something harmless? There has been no noticeable SEO downtick in terms of keywords or queries during the same period... Thanks for any thoughts. Screenshot-2015-05-19-13.58.55.png
Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam0 -
Webmaster Tools Manual Actions - Should I Disavow Spammy Links??
My website has a manual action against it in webmaster tools stating; Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole I have checked the link profile of my site and there are over 4,000 spammy links from one particular website which I am guessing this manual action refers to. There is no way that I will be able to get these links removed so should I be using Google's Disavow Tool or is there no need? Any ideas would be appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
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 -
Should you worry about adding geo-targeted pages to your site?
Post-Panda, should I worry about adding a bunch of geo-targeted landing pages at once? It's a community, people have added their location on their profile pages. I'm worried if we decide to make all the locations into hyperlinks that point to new geo-targeted pages, it could get us extra traffic for those geo-specific keyword phrases but penalize the site as a whole for having so many low-quality pages. What I'm thinking is maybe to start small and turn, say, United States into a hyperlink that points to a page (that would house our community members that reside in the United States) and add extra unique content to the page. And only add a new location page when we know we'll be adding unique content to it, so it's not basically just page sorting. Thoughts? Hope that makes sense. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Redesign existing websites / worried about urls / mapping
Hi Guys, While redesigning existing websites that will have page name changes such as: example.com/products to be called example.com/solutions example.com/about-us to be called example.com/about should I 301 the old url to the new url. In the past I have not done this & I'm just wondering from an SEO point of view how bad is this? (On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is this not 301ing urls, 10 being really bad & 1 being fine), Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0