Website Vulnerability Leading to Doorway Page Spam. Need Help.
-
Keywords he is ranking for , houston dwi lawyer, houston dwi attorney and etc..
Client was acquired in June and since then we have done nothing but build high quality links to the website. None of our clients were dropped/dinged or impacted by the panda/penguin updates in 2012 or updates previously published via Google. Which proves we do quality SEO work. We went ahead and started duplicating links which worked for other legal clients and 5 months later this client is either dropping or staying in local maps results and we are performing very badly in organic results.
Some more history.....
When he first engaged our company we switched his website from a CMS called plone to word press. During our move I ran some searches to figure out which pages we needed to 301 and we came across many profile pages or member pages created on the clients CMS (PLONE). These pages were very spammy and linked to other plone sites using car model,make,year type keywords (ex:jeep cherokee dealerships). I went through these sites to see if they were linking back and could not find any back links to my clients website. Obviously nobody authorized these pages, they all looked very hackish and it seemed as though there was a vulnerability on his plone CMS installation which nobody caught.
Fast forward 5 months and the newest OSE update is showing me a good 50+ back links with unrelated anchor text back links. These anchor text links are the same color as the background and can only be found if you hover your mouse over certain areas of the site. All of these sites are built on Plone and allot of them are linked to other businesses or community websites. These websites obviously have no clue they have been hacked or are being used for black hat purposes.
There are dozens of unrelated anchor text links being used on external websites which are pointing back to our clients website.
Examples: <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">autex Isuzu, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">Toyota service department ratings, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">die cast BMW and etc..</a>
Obviously the first step is to use the disavow link tool, which will be completed this week.
The second step is to take some feedback from the SEO community. It seems like these pages are automatically created using some type of bot. It will be very tedious if we have to continually remove these links. I hope there is a way to notify Google that these websites are all plone and have a vulnerability, which black hats are using to harm the innocent...
If i cannot get Google to handle this, then the only other option is to start fresh with a new domain name.
What would you do in this situation. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you
-
Thanks for the thought.
I'm going to give it a try, didn't think about that. Nothing special about our 301's.
-
I've definitely seen issues lately where mass 301-ing a lot of pages all to one page caused some problems with Google. If there were bad/suspicious links to some of those pages, it could definitely exacerbate the problem. You may have to try killing some of those redirects, especially from the worst pages. If you don't get traffic to those pages and you know the links are suspect (whether or not you created them), I'd strongly consider 404-ing some of those pages and cutting the redirects. How deep you have to cut depends on how bad the damage is and how much risk you're willing to take. It's definitely not for the faint of heart, but if the situation is bad enough, it may be necessary.
-
Thanks for the reply. We got the clients primary domain (internal pages were always fine) out of penalization by using the disavow tool and still our rankings have not come back.
Furthermore it looks like we found about 4k new links pointing back to pages which were redirected automatically to the home page upon creation of wordpress (wordpress 301 plugins). We changed the landing page for 301's to be a .com/lost page and that page is setup as no follow/index.
When it comes to the on page factors, I think the domain it self has too many pages talking about DWI. Posts that is. My next step is to remove all these Spammy blog posts (real news however) and see if that gives us a return in rankings.
When it comes to the duplicating links, i am definitely not over exchanging links between clients . Occasionally i will link one or two clients because they are beneficial to one another (personal injury links to a divorce lawyer in the same city). But the majority of links are pr's, he directories, web 2.0 and other links from industry sites.
Picking up a client from a horrible SEO company is probably the hardest project i have picked up thus far and i just picked up two more.... FML
From scratch we can pull a new website from zero to top of page one in 6months, but this has me stumped.
Thanks for your help and maybe one day i will do a write up about my solutions.
-
Unfortunately, even across the broader community, specific technical issues with specific CMS platforms can be really hard to find an answer to. You need someone who's been in exactly your situation, in most cases. I'm seeing multiple mentions on the web for Plone security holes:
http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106-announcement
If you think this is primarily an issue of these bad links, then using the new disavow tool is your best (if imperfect) option right now, most likely. Otherwise, you're left contacting each website to let them know they have a hole. If you think this is a new vulnerability, you could try to work with Plone directly, but that would rely on all of these sites patching the hole. In other words, even if Plone releases a fix, everyone has to actually apply it, and that often doesn't happen. So, cutting off the links via Google is probably more effective.
Given that you switched platforms, though, I'd really dig deep and make sure you haven't run into other problems. For example, did the WordPress switch introduce new duplicate content? Did any of your TITLE tags, URLs, or other on-page factors change? Are they links you're "duplicating" starting to look like a network to Google? It's entirely possible for one site to get hit and not others, especially in a competitive vertical. I'd look long and hard at your whole portfolio and make sure this isn't a signal that something worse is about to happen.
That's conjecture, but I've just seen too many SEO companies jump to the conclusion of foul play, only to miss something they had control over. Make sure you're looking at the whole picture.
-
Amazing i could not get a response on this.
-
any help on this
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
-
Page title optimisation - Does suffix keywords matters?
Hi Moz community, We can see in many of the page titles; "brand & keyword" go after every topic like..... "best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles". Do Google count this suffix as any other word in page title or give low preference just because it has been repeated across every single page? What if the "keyword" is repeated with topic and brand name as well. I mean which one of the below 2 page titles gonna workout better in correlation with keyword and website authority ? best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles best tiles for kitchen | vertigo Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Clean-up Question after a wordpress site Hack added pages with external links from a massive link wheel?
Hey All, Thought I would throw this out to ensure I am dotting my "i's" and crossing my "t's"..... Client WordPress site was hacked injected 3-4 pages that cross linked to hundreds (affiliate junk spam link wheel). Pages were removed, 3rd party cleared all malware/viruses. Heavy duty firewall and security monitoring are in place. Hacked pages are now showing as 404. No penalties, ranking issues....If anything there was a temporary BOOST in rankings due to the large link-wheel type net that the pages were receiving....That has since leveled out rankings. I guess my question is, in your opinion is it best to let those pages 404, I am noticing a large amount of links going to them from all over the world from this large link net that was built. I find the temptation to 301 re-direct deleted pages to the homepage difficult...lol..{the temptation is REAL}. Is there anything I am missing? Any other steps that YOU would take? I am assuming letting those pages 404 would be the best bet, as in time they will roll off index.... Thank you in advance, I appreciate any feedback or opinions....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Anthony_Howard0 -
Difference between anchor text pointing to an article in our section pages and the title of our article
My concern is described more in details in the following hypothetic scenario(basically this is the same method that CNN site applies to its site): In one page i have a specific anchor text e.g. "A firefighter rescued a young boy" and this one is linked to an article which if you enter you will see that it has a different title than the anchor text/short title that i mentioned above. So the internal titlte of the article is "A firefighte rescued a young boy in Philippines while it was rainy". I want to know whether this is a good SEO practice or not. Regards, Christos
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DPG_Media0 -
Update: Copied Website
So I discovered a website the other day that is a complete duplicate of ours: justinchina.co.uk This is our website: petmedicalcenter.com . Thanks to help from Erica, I dug in deeper to see why this was happening. It seems that the justinchinca.co.uk which is hosted by GoDaddy has their A Record pointing at our web host. So that being said, our website does not seem to be hacked which is good news. Would this still cause an issue with our Google rankings? Our host, Host Monster said to contact GoDaddy and GoDaddy said that a domain owner can point their URL to anywhere that they choose. Anyway, any feedback would be helpful. Thanks for everyone thus far that has helped me. Brant
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCB11210 -
Will blank category pages automatically get updated
Hello, We've got old category pages that are blank like domain/shoes.html (blank white page not in menu anymore) domain/newshoesurl.html (working URL with link in menu) Will the blank pages be automatically deindexed and updated by Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Article pages not ranking as well as they should
Hello, Our articles here are not ranking as strongly as they should. Could you take a look and tell me why? When I search for the exact article title we do not come up. We used to. Note our sitewide footer links to some articles in case that's the problem, but even articles not in the footer links aren't performing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Shadow Pages for Flash Content
Hello. I am curious to better understand what I've been told are "shadow pages" for Flash experiences. So for example, go here:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mozcrush
http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Kraft.aspx#/home View the page as Googlebot and you'll see an HTML page. It is completely different than the Flash page. 1. Is this ok?
2. If I make my shadow page mirror the Flash page, can I put links in it that lead the user to the same places that the Flash experience does?
3. Can I put "Pinterest" Pin-able images in my shadow page?
3. Can a create a shadow page for a video that has the transcript in it? Is this the same as closed captioning? Thanks so much in advance, -GoogleCrush0 -
How is this different than Go Daddy Spam?
Out of boredom, I googled up "SEO Company". #1 result is qualifiedimpressions.com. Taking a look at their link profile it seems they are utilizing anchor text on all their clients' websites. Moreover, it appears they have multiple sites for each of their phrases (which they cross link). Qualified Impressions - SEO Company WeBuildRankings.com - SEO Service VisibilitySquad - SEO Companies Some of their clients are rocking multiple anchor text links. How is this not any different than what Go Daddy did recently?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ErikDster1