Spammy 404s: Should I Worry?
-
One of my sites is getting a ton of spammy 404s with porno-like URLs. All of these 404s are linked from other sites that I assume also got hacked, and when I click on them, they are also 404s.
So I'm assuming some spam site is tricking the Googlebot into thinking these URLs exist. But is this going to affect my site & SEO directly?
Is it worth disavowing all of the sites linking to me? Is Google even considering these real links? Did these pages ever actually exist anywhere?
Don't have a hacker-brain whatsoever so I need some enlightening.
I've been told I shouldn't worry but it seems like something I should worry about...Any help is greatly appreciated
(I've updated to the newest Wordpress and Sucuri).
-
The pages definitely don't exist anywhere.
Does this mean I have nothing to worry about?
-
There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.
Often those injected spam URLs are hidden using javascript. There's a Chrome plugin called Quick Javascript Switcher that will let you toggle JS on and off. Once it's off, if there are injected URLs on your site, you should be able to see them.
-
The first thing I recommend is to make sure that those are actually 404 errors on your site that the search engines (and regular users) can see. There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.
I would look in Google to see if those 404 pages on your site are indexed. Try a site:yourdomain.com search to see if they're indexed. Then, use a crawler to crawl your own website to see if the crawler can find those 404 pages.
Typically, when you see those errors, the site has been hacked and now they've been removed. Or, those pages are on your site but when you go to them they appear to be 404s. I recommend you investigate this further to make sure that the pages or the errors do not exist.
-
As to should you worry, we need more info. Of all the links you show in a tool like ahrefs or Majestic, what percentage are these links?
Can you pm me a sample of one or two of them? I will be happy to tell you what I think once I am clear on what they are. We also do a ton with WP so could probably give you some direction there. I am only saying PM so that you can disclose if you don't want to disclose in public. I am not going to in any way try to sell you on our services and if you wanted service I would refer you as I don't like people hawking through Moz Q&A.
Best -
Hi there
Has this been an ongoing issue and you are seeing more and more 404 links coming in? If so, Google has ways of notifying them on potentially spammy / hacked websites, so you could start there.
If it's something where these links are taking up a good portion of your backlink profile, I would do a quick audit and possibly disavow. This may take a bit of work, so if you're not comfortable, Moz has a great recommended companies list of agencies / consultants that will be more than happy to help.
Let me know if this helps or if you have any more questions! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Surge in spammy links
Hi, Our website www.foodjet.com has recently seen a huge amount of spammy incoming links to non-exisiting URLS: They all target pages that lead to a 404 and which clearly do not exist on our website. Since they have started to appear our DA has plummeted. I have already disavowed some domains, but more re-appear just as fast. I have also checked if our site has been hacked, which does not seem to be the case. What am I missing? And/or what can I do?
Technical SEO | | FoodJEt0 -
Spam pages being redirected to 404s but sill indexed
Client had a website that was hacked about a year ago. Hackers went in and added a bunch of spam landing pages for various products. This was before the site had installed an SSL certificate. After the hack, the site was purged of the hacked pages and and SLL certificate was implemented. Part of that process involved setting up a rewrite that redirects http pages to the https versions. The trouble is that the spam pages are still being indexed by Google, even months later. If I do a site: search I still see all of those spam pages come up before most of the key "real" landing pages. The thing is, the listing on the SERP are to the http versions, so they're redirecting to the https version before serving a 404. Is there any way I can fix this without removing the rewrite rule?
Technical SEO | | SearchPros1 -
Old forum with 404s, what should I do?
Hello, So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors. What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page. I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource. 1. Is this interpretation correct?
Technical SEO | | jordanayresaira
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot 3. What should I recommend?0 -
Question re: spammy internal links on site
Hi all, I have a blog (managed via WordPress) that seems to have built spammy internal links that were not created by us on our end. See "site:blog.execu-search.com" in Google search results. It seems to be a pharma-hack that's creating spammy links on our blog to random offers re: viagra, paxil, xenical, etc. When viewing "Security Issues", GSC doesn't state that the site has been infected and it seems like the site is in good health according to Google. Will anyone be able to provide any insight on the best necessary steps to take to remove these links and to run a check on my blog to see if it is in fact infected? Should all spammy internal links by disavowed? Here are a couple of my findings: When looking at "internal links" in GSC, I see a few mentions of these spammy links. When running a site crawl in Moz, I don't see any mention of these spammy links. The spammy links are leading to a 404 page. However, it appears some of the cached version in Google are still displaying the page. Please lmk. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks all! Best,
Technical SEO | | hdeg
Sung0 -
My site was hacked and spammy URLs were injected that pointed out. The issue was fixed, but GWT is still reporting more of these links.
Excuse me for posting this here, I wasn't having much luck going through GWT support. We recently moved our eCommerce site to a new server and in the process the site was hacked. Spammy URLs were injected in, all of which were pointing outwards to some spammy eCommerce retail stores. I removed ~4,000 of these links, but more continue to pile in. As you can see, there are now over 20,000 of these links. Note that our server support team does not see these links anywhere. I understand that Google doesn't generally view this as a problem. But is that true given my circumstance? I cannot imagine that 20,000 new, senseless 404's can be healthy for my website. If I can't get a good response here, would anyone know of a direct Google support email or number I can use for this issue?
Technical SEO | | jampaper0 -
Thousands of 404s
Hi there, I'm working on a site that has a ridiculous number of 404s being returned by webmaster tools. We believe this was because there was an onpage error that was amending the urls and adding in folders that shouldn't have been in a big spiral i.e. /salons/uk/teeth became something like /salons/uk/teeth/salons/edinburgh/hair/teeth... Anyway, we think the issue is now sorted, but these pages were indexed it seems, and so it looks like Google is still searching for them when it crawls the site. What's my best move? It's the sheers volume (over 13,000) that has me concerned so I thought it best to seek some expert advice before continuing. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Google WMT continues reporting fixed 404s - why?
I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring. This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc. Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them. By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back. The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors. The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere. Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again? Thanks -Juanita
Technical SEO | | VoxxiVoxxi0 -
Should you worry about adding geo-targeted pages to your site?
Post-Panda, should I worry about adding a bunch of geo-targeted landing pages at once? It's a community, people have added their location on their profile pages. I'm worried if we decide to make all the locations into hyperlinks that point to new geo-targeted pages, it could get us extra traffic for those geo-specific keyword phrases but penalize the site as a whole for having so many low-quality pages. What I'm thinking is maybe to start small and turn, say, United States into a hyperlink that points to a page (that would house our community members that reside in the United States) and add extra unique content to the page. And only add a new location page when we know we'll be adding unique content to it, so it's not basically just page sorting. Thoughts? Hope that makes sense. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | poolguy0