Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
-
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking.
How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
-
This is the correct answer.
To expand on this slightly, just make sure none of the 404s are internal (ie there are no links on your site pointing to one of these dodgy pages as a result of the hack) and you're all good.
Remove the entries from your htaccess file to avoid having to parse them constantly and let any external links to dodgy pages 404. This sort of circumstance is exactly what 404s are made for!
The only site at risk of a ranking drop from these 404s is the one pointing to those dodgy pages - who cares about your hackers' rankings?
-
So robots part could be at the end but in my case it worked fine too.
-
Just a correction here. I agree with all the items above, with one very, very, very, very, very important change.
DO NOT set the corrected urls to disallow in your robots.txt
If you do not allow Google to crawl the pages, Google will not see that the links were removed, that the page is now 4xx, etc. If you were to disallow all those pages, all the clean up work that you have done will not be seen by Google and would be for naught.
If you later want to disallow those pages, that would be fine, but you need to let Google see your clean up work first.
-
Hi
I just finished similar job.
What you should do:
- collect all bad "pages" and links pointing to them
- find a pattern like some kind of directory
- set them (directories I believe?) 410, not 404
- set robots to disallow those directories
- push all pages and links to reindex
- remove from Google index
- done (need to wait some time)
Important thing is to get rid of all bad links pointing to those pages. If you do that, then there'll be no issues. However this could be ongoing negseo. If you need help with that, pm me.
Krzysztof
-
If they are garbage links, why are you redirecting them? Let them 404. Having not found pages does not lead to penalties, in and of itself.
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
-
Set Robots.txt file to crawl my website at specific times
Our website provider has stated that they can only 'lift' their block on our website in order for it to be crawled as specific times. Is there any way to amend a robots.txt to ensure that it crawls our website at a specific time of day/night in order to coincide with the block being lifted? Many Thanks, Charlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharleneKennedy120 -
Too many 301 Redirects caused lower rankings :(
1. Ok so I code my eCommerce site myself first 2. Then switched to Shopify and re-direct all my URLs (terrible mistake) 3. Then Shopify didn't do in terms of seo, so I switched to BigCommerce and re-direct all my URLs (Yes I know but at least this platform is much better) I started getting 404 errors as you can imagine in webmaster tools after switching from Shopify and there were 504 of them. Why its too many because I realized that Shopfiy just creates so many urls for the same pages. One by one I re-direct them to their new destinations. As you can imagine my rankings dropped. As my site speed is now 5.5s at gmetrix. mobile 47 - desktop 80 on Google Site speed tool. Looking at the links now, some of the 404's does not make sense to redirect. How should I approach this? Should I remove some of them if they were not used on web anywhere, no sites linking to that page and let them die in time? OR Should I keep them all? I am giving some examples below, there are so many for each. Thank you all! /account/login/ /blog/?page=7 blog/tagged/recipe /blogs/news /blogs/news?page=6 /collections/all/category-name /collections/frontpage/category-name /collections/frontpage/products/product-name /collections/shop/category-name /collections/shop/products/product-name /product-name/ /pages/terms-privacy /pages/frontpage /products/product-name /shop/products/product-name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mounayoga0 -
Can I undo a 301 redirect? Will it penalize my ranking?
I'm in charge of building a website for a company that made a mess. They own domain xxx.it (xxx is not the real domain, just a placeholder). Some years ago they 301 redirected xxx.it to xxx.com (they just changed TLDs). Last year they 301 redirected xxx.com to yyy.com (so, they actually changed domains). Now, after 13 months, the company failed and the new leadership wants me to undo everything and 301 redirect from yyy.com to xxx.it. So: 301 redirect is permanent. So, conceptually it's wrong to undo it. What happens if I undo it? Will my ranking be penalized, even if a significant amount of time has passed (13 months)? Will crawlers detect a loop (even if i remove any 301 redirect from xxx.it and theorically break the loop)? Here is the potential loop: xxx.it -> xxx.com -> yyy.com -> xxx.it -> etc... All of the articles I found on the web are quite old and not clear about this topic, that's why I'm asking this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naska19900 -
Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?
Hello! The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority. Please help! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colin.Accela0 -
301 redirect for page 2, page 3 etc of an article or feed
Hey guys, We're looking to move a blog feed we have to a new static URL page. We are using 301 redirects but I'm unsure of what to regarding page 2, page 3 etc. of the feed. How do I make sure those urls are being redirected as well? For example: Moving FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/ to a new page url FloridaDentist.com/dental-tips. So, we are using a 301 on that old url to the new one. My questions is what to do with the other pages like FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/page/3. How do we make sure that page is also 301'd to the new main url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Is 301 redirecting your index page to the root '/' safe to do or do you end up in an endless loop?
Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue. Many thanks in advance David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Deleting Website Section, Preserve Links with 301?
HI Mozers! I have a client who is deleting their community section of their website because they have little activity. I know there are some inbound links going the the community section. If I 301 redirect those links to the homepage instead, will that still preserve the SEO credit of the link -OR-is Google smart enough to know it's redirecting the the homepage and kill the link love? My initial thoughts are that Google will see that it's being redirected to the homepage and not count the link anymore, but I'm just guessing. Any ideas? Anyone have any experience in something like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SavvyPanda0 -
SEOMOZ found basically all my articles and says they need a 301 redirect ?
Hope someone can HELP. So my site looks like it has the proper 301 redirect to www. for the main domain. But for some reason my articles that have a /trackback on them redirect to same address with out the trackback at the end. How do i fix this? seomoz is saying all my articles need a 301 redirect .all like 100. Thanks any help would be great
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jstgobig0