Not found errors (404) due to being hacked

[monicapopa]

Hi Moz Guru's

Our website was hacked a few months ago, since then we have taken various measures, last one being redesigning the website all together and removing it from a WordPress platform. So far all is going well, except that the 404 not found errors keeps coming up in Google Webmaster tools. The URLs are spam pages that were created by the virus. And these spam pages have been indexed by Google, and now we are struggling to get rid of them.

Is there any way we can deal with these 404 spam pages links? Is marking all of them as fixed in the webmaster tools - search console- crawl errors helpful in any way? Can this have a negative impact on the SEO ?

Looking forward to your answers.

Many thanks.

[julie-getonthemap]

I have a new client and just discovered on Open Site Explorer hundreds of links to ghost pages. The anchor text is stuff like Criminal Background Checks Las Vegas or Find Missing Persons.

I am not the webmaster.  What advice should I give him?

Julie

[monicapopa]

Green Stone,

Thank you for your reply. At the moment we are manually trying to remove the links by using "Remove outdated content" tool whilst also creating a list of spammy links that might backlink to those spam pages we are removing, that were created by the virus.

Thank you.

[GreenStone]

Monica,

Sounds like you guys have taken the necessary steps to clean up the website and prevent it from occurring again. 404 spam links are a pain, that can often take some time to be removed from google's index all-together.

• A way to speed up the process is by changing the 404 status of these pages, and having it return a "410" error instead. This tells google it is a permanent non-existent page, and thus it will fall out of the index more quickly than a regular 404.
• In the meantime, if the number of 404 errors aren't overwhelming, you could try the "remove urls" tool within search console for these pages, which will temporarily remove them from the index all together. (emphasis on temporary)
• Marking them as fixed wouldn't be helpful, as the errors still exist, and would return to your search console not long after. (it certainly wouldn't harm your SEO, it just wouldn't be very helpful in this specific instance).

Hope that helps.