Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?
-
My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html
The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links.
Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there.
The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com".
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
-
Hey, this is Russ here at Moz.
Do the redirects point to the homepage or to the current URL? For example, does the http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html redirect to http://newsite.com or http://newsite.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html
If it does redirect to the same URL on newsite.com, I would try using wildcard robots.txt entries to simply block the offending content altogether. For example, if all the spam is off the styless.asp page, you could simply block styless.asp?* in your robots.txt and prevent Google from ever crawling those spammy links.
However, if you are redirecting everything to the homepage, I think you will need to go back to the old webmaster and figure something out. While Google is great at detecting spam, once you are under a penalty it can be difficult to recover. No one is perfect, including Google, and you don't want to be one of their "mistakes".
-
Hi usDragons,
Having too many crawl errors is not healthy. Usually a few number of pages are deleted every now and then, but having hundreds or thousands of 404s means something is wrong with the website, and from your description it's obvious that something is wrong. In fact, redirecting unnatural/thin content pages to your website can harm it, as its in a way links that send traffic (through 301 redirects) to your website, so you need to disavow these.
Because you have no control over the website, you should treat it as an external site that is spamming you. So don't think of it as a site that you own but have no access to.
The disavow tool requires you to create a .TXT file that have an explanation of why you disavow each group of domains/links. So you should explain that these are bad links that send you traffic, and you tried to "request" deleting these links and you got no help from whoever controls it, which i guess is true in your case.
Try to explain everything in your comments (in the .TXT file) (See attached)
Good luck and I hope I could help in anyway.
-
Thanks. We've been through this bad link cleanup process before, but not this kind of situation. Some advice I read said Google doesn't care about those 404s because it's obviously unrelated spam, but I would think having so many crawl errors can't be healthy for the site and I don't like the idea of redirecting them to the new site.
Now the trick is we don't have control of the old site, so we can't verify it in Google Search Console. The old site is just a redirect to the current site, so there is no website to work with. Looks like the disavow tool wants you to select a website property, but we can only use the new domain name. Will the disavow tool understand that these bad links to the old domain are redirected to the new domain name?
-
usDragons, the best way to deal with these links is to use Google's Disavow Links tool to disavow them.
First, you need to identify all of the links, and you an do that by downloading all your links from Open Site Explorer, Majestic.com, ahrefs.com, and Google Search Console. Combine the lists and remove the duplicates.
You'll want to manually review all of them, make a list of the ones you want Google to ignore, then upload a list of the domain names using Google's disavow links tool. Google has more info about their disavow tool here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
-
Hi there,
Seems to me that you should follow the standard process when you have unnatural links. You should:
- Compile a list of links and domains.
- Contact Webmasters of these domains, requesting removal of links (include the pages where these links are added in your email)
- Save all your sent and received emails to/from Webmasters
- Ones that don't reply to you, email them one more time a couple of weeks later
- Create a disavow file for domains that you couldn't get links removed from, state the reason and dates of emails.
- Submit the disavow file to the disavow tools
I know its not straight froward nor fast, but thats how you maintain the public link profile of any website since the Penguin Updates started.
I hope it helps
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
-
Use existing page with bad URL or brand new URL?
Hello, We will be updating an existing page with more helpful information with the goal of reaching more potential customers through SEO and also attaching a SEM campaign to the specific landing page. The current URL of the page scores 25 on Page Authority, and has 2 links to it from blog articles (PA 35, 31). The current content needs to be rewritten to be more helpful and also needs some additional information. The downsides are that it has an "bad" URL- no target keyword and uses underscores. Which of the following choices would you make? 1. Update this old "bad" URL with new content. Benefit from the existing PA. -or- 2. Start with a new optimized URL, reusing some of the old content and utilizing a 301 redirect from the previous page? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | XLMarketing0 -
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
My Alexa ranking dropped after a 301 redirect is that bad?
I had all of my non www pages redirect to the www versions. My alexa ranking dropped and keeps dropping after I did this. I'm guessing its because its tracking the non www version. Does anyone know if this is correct and should I worry?
Technical SEO | | CandleCam0 -
Is Go Daddy a bad domain?
I heard today that Go Daddy is not the besting hosting domain for websites...it isn't crawled well by websites. Is this true? What is the best hosting domain?
Technical SEO | | CapitolShine0 -
Help with domain redirect advice please!
I run the website http://buildyourjacket.com. We have other domains as well, most importantly www.buildyourjacket.com and cvcsports.com. If you Google "letterman jackets" (our primary search term) cvcsports.com shows up as the first result (yay!). But that is not what we want. Until a few weeks ago, Google would show http://buildyourjacket.com as the domain for the first search result from "letterman jackets". But then a few weeks that changed. I don't know how that could have happened. There are two reasons why we want the domain http://buildyourjacket.com to be the one that shows up: 1) It's a better sounding/looking domain and 2) When it was showing up, Google also showed right below the domain another link of our that said "Build Your Own Jacket" which definitely helped us get more clicks. Can someone please help me and tell me what I should do? Thank you so much.
Technical SEO | | BrandonDoyle0 -
A client will be translating their entire site into French in addition to English. For SEO purposes, should I host it on the same domain or create its own dedicated domain?
The current site is a long-standing site with good authority and a good number of links. Thanks....
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0