Spam posts indexed, what to do now?
-
Hi,
So we had a staff problem last week and we let some spam posts (cheap nike jerseys etc.) that also got indexed by Google. (We just checked and there are lik 105 already indexed)
Of course we have now removed all these spam posts but what is the best practice at this point? Are we supposed to do something else to remove these from Google's index? (maybe through google webmaster tools?) We have already edited robots.txt to disallow those pages as a quick remedy.
And finally, could this have done any harm? We were quite slow noticing these posts to remove them. They were there for about 12 days.
thanks
-
Good to know
-
Hi,
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. We don't have any vulnerabilities. It was all my fault as I completely forgot that I had given administrative access to one of our former content managers who had temporarily allowed anonymous users to post on this certain section of the site. And once he left, we forgot to update that permission and never really noticed those posts, until today.
-
haha I just say you said "all those links had auto-nofollow on them"
NO PROBLEM MAN! rest easy! You cannot get penalized for nofollow links!
-
Thanks for the quick response. We're just requesting URL removal for all those URL's. I hope this makes it all good. No sign of ranking drop at the moment. We're lucky those pages were automatically filtered out by our sitemap.xml and all those links had auto-nofollow on them. Time to consider buying a service like Mollom I guess.
-
Do you know how the spam posts were published on your site? Just make sure the vulnerability is fixed so it doesn't happen again. Once the spam posts you found have been deleted from your site, you shouldn't have to do anything more since they will fall out of Google's index. Keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools though to see if you notice any more spam pages pop up on Google's radar and then manually remove them.
Here is Google's official answer - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734
When a page is updated or removed, it will automatically fall out of our search results. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen.
However, if you urgently need to remove content from Google's search results (for example, if you’ve already removed, updated, or blocked a page accidentally displaying confidential information like credit card numbers), you can request expedited removal of those URLs.
Our removal tools are intended for pages that urgently need to be removed—for example, if they contain confidential data that was accidentally exposed. Using the tools for other purposes may cause problems for your site.
Another Google resource if your site was actually hacked or compromised - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119
To take your site "offline" after being hacked. If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created—for example, http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed. Instead, clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site.
-
So someone was posting articles on your site that linked to other sites like paid links?
If you removed the posts no need to block them in robots.txt because they no longer exist so will not get crawled anymore. Yes definitely request removal in WMT URL removal tool and get those pages out of Google's index ASAP.
You're probably OK. Just keep your fingers crossed and an eye on rankings and run a tight ship so that doesn't happen again, definitely something you can get penalized for. Good thing you caught it quickly.
EDIT: if you meant that you let spam comments get posted live/approved by the admin then all you can do is remove the spammy posts and make sure your comment settings are set to need admin approval before getting posed live. No need to block in robots.txt or remove URLs in that case but it doesn't hurt. If the links are off of your site you should be fine.
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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Google is indexing our old domain
We changed our primary domain from vivitecsolutions.com to vivitec.net. Google is indexing our new domain, but still has our old domain indexed too. The problem is that the old site is timing out because of the https: Thought on how to make the old indexing go away or properly forward the https?
Technical SEO | | AdsposureDev0 -
Website indexing issues
My website is being indexed with both https - https with www. and no leader at all. example. https//www.example.com and https//example.com and example.com 3 different versions are being indexed. How would I begin resolving this? Hosting?
Technical SEO | | DigitalRipples0 -
Problems with to many indexed pages
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links. Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out. Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories. I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index? The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
How can I stop google indexing an image
I have put a map of cornwall on my site on the Corwnall Page, and for some reason Google.de has picked it up and shows it up in the top 4 images for a search for cornwall? The result is I am getting about 80% of the traffic coming to my site for the search Cornwall (I get about 50 unique visits per day, over 40 a day are landing on the Cornwall page. Is this a problem for my normal SEO as a Close up Magician? Will google start to think my site is about Cornwall? Should I noindex the image (I say that like I know how! - How do I noindex that image? ) Or is any traffic to a site good traffic, I imagine they will be clicking on the link landing on the page and then leaving, which I suspect is not good for google reputation. Any thoughts anyone Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk Where they land http://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/map-of-cornwall.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/magician-cornwall-magicians-hire-cornwall&h=904&w=1000&sz=167&tbnid=9GFlDv3BTz4ikM:&tbnh=99&tbnw=110&zoom=1&usg=__-b4bUYWREU_wAy2M04LrsrkzZpw=&docid=AUFmzso0arbGDM&sa=X&ei=HLZ2UpGYDMrY0QWXp4D4Dg&ved=0CEgQ9QEwAw&dur=2958
Technical SEO | | rnperki0 -
Duplicate content issue index.html vs non index.html
Hi I have an issue. In my client's profile, I found that the "index.html" are mostly authoritative than non "index.html", and I found that www. version is more authoritative than non www. The problem is that I find the opposite situation where non "index.html" are more authoritative than "index.html" or non www more authoritative than www. My logic would tell me to still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html". Am I right? and in the case I find the opposite happening, does it matter if I still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html"? The same question for www vs non www versions? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Some site pages are removed from Google Index
Hello, Some pages of my clients website are removed from Google Index. We were in top 10 position for some keywords but now I cannot find those pages neither in top 1000. Any idea what to do in order to get these pages back? thank you
Technical SEO | | besartbajrami0