How to de-index a page with a search string with the structure domain.com/?"spam"
-
The site in question was hacked years ago. All the security scans come up clean but the seo crawlers like semrush and ahrefs still show it as an indexed page. I can even click through on it and it takes me to the homepage with no 301. Where is the page and how to deindex it?
domain/com/?spam
There are multiple instances of this.
http://www.clipular.com/c/5579083284217856.png?k=Q173VG9pkRrxBl0b5prNqIozPZI
-
You are most welcome. I'm glad to hear your road to site recovery is coming along. I'm also glad to confirm that, to all of my knowledge, your understanding of the "*" operator and Disallow /?spam string is correct. One more thing:
Fetch as Google and Request Indexing
Apologies, I neglected to mention this step in my answer. It should be included. This is the best tool I'm aware of to ask Google, "hey, crawl me please." Do this after you upload your shiny new robots.txt.In GSC, under Crawl, select Fetch as Google. Then, select Fetch and Render. When status is partial or complete, click Request Indexing. There is no guarantee here, and my experience is Google does what it wants. Even so, I've seen results in less than 2 hours (full disclosure: the longest I've waited has been 3 days).
Penalty Free I agree. They cannot possibly be penalizing your site. At least, not purposefully. You have taken all recommended actions and then some to resolve site issues. Even if you do have a few bad back links floating around out there from some blackhat t3 site PBN, Penguin 4.0 should discredit that bad link juice. Your site doesn't even have the offending pages. It's just a matter of time before Google's index lines back up with your live site.
Good Work Sir,
Wipe the Index Clean,
CopyChrisSEO and the Vizergy Team -
Thanks very much for your explanation.
I have gone ahead and temporarily blocked the pages in GSC.
I am working on the robot.txt and see there are no instructions for the crawlers to skip over these urls in question.
I understand that I should use the "*" operator to alert all crawlers to disallow the pages in this format:
user-agent: *
Disallow: /?spam string
Finally, I will send the suggested edit to Google and see where that gets me. Honestly, at this point, they cannot possibly be penalized the site any worse so anything working towards cleaning up the index for the site will be a step in the right direction.
-
Hello Miamirealestatetrendsguy and fellow Mozers,
It sounds like you have had a crazy time handling this hack. Good news is, as far as I can tell from the given information, you are close to resolution. Googlebot should correct the indexed pages over time. I'm certain you would like to expedite that process. Here are three recommendations that come to mind: Remove URLs via GSC, block the offending URLs via robots.txt, and suggest edits in Google's SERPs.
Remove URLs via GSC
In GSC, under Google Index, select Remove URLs. This suppression is temporary however. Click on more information for more about that. My experience with it as been suppression for a few months. Don't worry about the time though. Our next step should take affect before your time is up.Block the Offending URLs via Robots.txt
Before you do this, be very certain what you are doing. After you are confident, list your offending URLs, edit the offending URLs as noindex nofollow in your robots.txt, and upload it. Hopefully, you can find commonalities to shorten this list and save your time.Note: I have purposefully avoided the details on how to this here because it is vital SEOs learn how to do it with full knowledge of potential risks as well as how to avoid those risks. Here are some resources:
• Google Support • Moz's Robots.txt Rundown
• Search Engine Land's Deeper LookSuggest Edits in Google's SERPs This one is iffy, and I really don't trust Google using this feedback. However, I have done it and it worked more than once. Find your offending results and send specific feedback.
Wipe that Index Clean,
CopyChrisSEO and the Vizergy Team
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 My Site Structure Suppressing Product Pages
Hey Guys, I've built some ecommerce sites using WooCommerce, and I've been auditing some of the sites to see why I'm not getting more traffic to my product pages. I have several informational blog posts and resources that are getting a lot of traffic, but my product pages aren't ranking very well. There are two things that I think could be causing the issue, but I could use some extra eyes on this. Products are listed several sub-categories down in the structure of the site. For example, this product is listed under a fifth level sub-category: /product-category/ ->FIRE SAFETY » FIRE EXTINGUISHERS » PORTABLE FIRE EXTINGUISHERS » FIRE EXTINGUISHER ACCESSORIES » FIRE EXTINGUISHER BRACKETS Also, I checked to see what Google's indexed under the /product/ directory, which is the default format for WooCommerce products. It looks like all of my products are given lower authority than other top-level directories, including /product-tag/ and /product-category/ It seems like an adjustment to how my products are structured in the site might go a long way. If you have any experience with this and could weigh in on it, I'd appreciate it.
Technical SEO | | robbinsinternational0 -
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
How to block text on a page to be indexed?
I would like to block the spider indexing a block of text inside a page , however I do not want to block the whole page with, for example , a noindex tag. I have tried already with a tag like this : chocolate pudding chocolate pudding However this is not working for my case, a travel related website. thanks in advance for your support. Best regards Gianluca
Technical SEO | | CharmingGuy0 -
Implementation of rel="next" & rel="prev"
Hi All, I'm looking to implement rel="next" & rel="prev", so I've been looking for examples. I looked at the source code for the MOZ.com forum, if anyone one is going to do it properly MOZ are. I noticed that the rel="next" & rel="prev" tags have been implemented in the a href tags that link to the previous and next pages rather than in the head. I'm assuming this is fine with Google but in their documentation they state to put the tags in the . Does it matter? Neil.
Technical SEO | | NDAY0 -
What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?
This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files." Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post." Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down. My question is two parts: 1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed? 2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script? 3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page? Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Backlinks go to "example.com" our homepage is "example.com/default.html" am I losing internal link power?
Hey everyone! Thanks again for everybodies contributions to my questions over the last few months. As the title states, our homepage is at "example.com/default.html" but everybody that backlinks to us (as expected) to "example.com" does that mean that I am probably losing a lot of the power of my links??
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Domain.com and domain.com/ redirect(error)
When I view my campaign report I'm seeing duplicate content/ meta for mydomain.com and mydomain.com/ (with a slash) I already applied a 301 redirect as follows: redirect 301 /index.php/ /index.php Where am I messing up here?
Technical SEO | | cgman0 -
Getting multiple errors for domain.com/xxxx/xxxx/feed/feed/feed/feed...
A recent SEOMoz crawl report is showing a bunch 404's and duplicate page content on pages with urls like http://domain.com/categories/about/feed/feed/feed/feed/feed and on and on. This is a wordpress install. Does anyone know what could be causing this or why SEOMoz would be trying to read these non-existent feed pages?
Technical SEO | | Brandtailers0