Spider 404 errors linked to purchased domain
-
Hi,
My client purchased a domain which based on the seller "promising lots of traffic". Subsequent investigation showed it was a scam and that the seller had been creative in Photoshop with some GA reports.
Nevertheless, my client had redirected the acquired domain to their primary domain (via the domain registrar).
From the period on which the acquired domain was redirected to the point when we removed the redirect, the web log files had a high volume of spider/bot 404 errors relating to an online pharmaacy - viagra, pills etc.
The account does not seem to have been hacked. No additional files are present and the rest of the logs seem normal. As soon as the redirect was removed the spider 404 errors stopped.
Aside from the advice about acquiring domains promising traffic which I've already discussed with my client, does anybody have any ideas about how a redirect could cause the 404 errors?
Thanks
-
Hard to say, I doubt you would be penalized for only incoming links if your site is clean. But you may always have that history. You could add the site to webmaster tools and submit a reinclusion request explaining the situation. They maybe be able to "wipe the slate clean" for you.
-
Hi Steve, Many thanks for replying.
I checked the acquired domain in OSE and there are 302 redirects from an online pharmacy (that according to the wayback machine existed back in 2009) to pharmacy pages on the acquired domain. In turn OSE shows the linking site has a single link from a dodgy looking russian site called picto.ru. So, I guess the spiders are simply following the links.
Assuming my client wants to use the acquired domain will they get penalised for the existing spammy links?
-
The purchased domain used to have those pages, and when you redirected it, the engines were looking for them on your domain.
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
-
Fixing Bounce Rate between Domain and Subdomain
Currently, the way our site is set up, our clients generally visit our homepage and then login through a separate page that is a subdomain, or they can read our blog/support articles that are also on separate subdomains. From my understanding, this can be counted as a bounce, and I know this sorta of site structure isn't ideal, but with our current dev resources and dependencies, fixing this isn't going to happen overnight. Regardless, what would be the easiest way to implement this fix witihn the Google Analytics code? EX: If someone visits our site at X.com, and then wants to login at portal.X.com, I don't want to count that as a bounce. Any insight is appreciated! Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | KathleenDC0 -
Buffer Link and Google Impressions
Afternoon, I noticed a spike in impressions over a couple of days in April, so I investigated Analytics to see where these were coming from. It appears these impressions were split between two URLs; one was a blog post, the other was the Buffer link to the blog post that we used on Twitter and Facebook. According to Analytics, this Buffer URL received 1000 impressions over two days, with an average SERP position of 16. This surely can't be right, can it? Is this just another Analytics quirk? After two days of a decent amount of impressions to this Buffer link, the amount of impressions dropped to pretty much zero. I know Tweets are now starting to rank, but this would be the Twitter URL, not the Buffer link to our blog post? Any ideas, Cheers, Lewis
Reporting & Analytics | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Page Name Tracking - Without UTM links
Hello, Our current site is fully html with no cms. We're moving to a newer version today with a typo 3 cms. My one worry is as follows; On some pages an internal link opens a jquery lightbox, inside the lightbox will be a video or download link. I cannot simply add a standard event url like I wanted to (utm_ link) as the pages are linked via the cms pointing to different pages, not the url's. We really need the following appearing in Analytics, whether its an event or landing page; The click of the light-box link The click of the video OR download link inside the lightbox. I would really, really appreciate any help on this as the new website is going live today, regardless whether this has been resolved. Thank you very much in advance of any replies. twY8s8B.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Whittie0 -
Pinterest links have been growing in Webmaster Tools
I've been using Pinterest for a couple of years now. It has been great in promoting our brand and generating referral traffic. My question is this. I've noticed in Webmaster Tools, in the "Links to your site" section, that my links from Pinterest has really shot up.It's gone from 3,500 links, 6 months ago, to over 23,000 recently. Those of you using Pinterest, have you seen a similar increase? Just wondering if Google is recognizing more of the links, even though they are "no-follow" links.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Why is my Domain Authority dropping from 52 to 46 but my Keyword ranking has never been higher?
At the start of August my Domain Authority was 52 but it has fallen to 46 over the course of 8 weeks. At first this was credited to the smaller index that SEOMOZ has taken and when this was certainly in line with our rivals results as well who all suffered a drop. When the index issue was fixed we did see an improvement, back up to 51 at the start of September, pretty much in line with all of our rivals. However our Domain Authority has dropped again and this time it is in complete isolation, none of our rivals have suffered anything like a 3 point drop. Our SEO has never been better with 65% of our keywords ranking in the top 3 and 86% ranking in the top 10. Im wondering what is causing this rapid drop in Domain Authority and what affect, if any, it was have on our future keyword rankings. Thanks, Emmet
Reporting & Analytics | | CertificationEU0 -
Difference between page/domain authority
could anyone explain the difference between Page Authority and Domain Authoity to me or give me a link to a site where it is explained? Sorry if It's really obvious and I'm just too stupid to find out, but I've searched and haven't found anything.
Reporting & Analytics | | mtueckcr0 -
Do Google penalise you for having too many 404's?
Hi There I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools. We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found. However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control. This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate. Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further. Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri.. URL Discovery Date
Reporting & Analytics | | ArenaFlowers.com
http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
Sep 12, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
Sep 9, 2011 I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control. Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves? Thanks! Sam.0 -
Google: show all images indexed on a domain
Is there a way to display all images that google has indexed on a domain / subdomain? I'm basically looking for something like a site:-command for google image search.
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0