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.
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
-
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
301 Redirect from query string to new static page
If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt.nails0 -
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Too many 301 redirects?
Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website. These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website? If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
How to deal with competition with a similar domain name as my client website?
How can I deal with other websites that have a keyword domain name similar to my client website? I get a few domains similar to my client domain name just to avoid the same issue, but there are a few others ranking for the same keywords and I don't want posible customers get confused with a similar domain name. I have social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and etc), but they are not ranking on the first page. This is the situation: www.domain.com that would be my client's domain. And the competition: www.bestdomain.com www.thedomain.com www.domaincomapany.com And a few more. At this time my client is ranking #1 position, but all the others ar 1 or 2 positions bellow.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0