Hundreds of Thousand Spammy Backlinks Overnight
-
Hello,
I have a client who unfortunately got breached (not sure how) and as a result 6 HTML files promoting gucci bags and Louis Vuitton bags were put in the root.
I found the files within a week of them being put there but what I didn't realise (and only found yesterday when looking at the backlink profile) was that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of spammy domains pointing at these files.Some of the sites 404 but some are posts on other bloggers sites who auto accept comments and they total 10,000 links so impossible to remove.
Question is:
-
Will Google understand what has happened and ignore these links (especially because the pages don't exist on the server?)
-
Should I use the Disavow tool to block these 1000 odd domains (can it do any harm?) and more links are being found every day so do I just keep doing it?
-
Is there another way to explain to Google what has happened?
Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
James -
-
Wanted to add one more thing. If it's possible, you may want to use the url removal tool to remove these new nasty pages from the Google index.
-
If you remove these pages so that they serve a 404 or 410 error then it will essentially remove the links and Google will pay no attention to them. More info: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website
You could definitely disavow these links and it would not harm your site to do so. Do it at the domain level, not the url. With that being said, if all of the links point at pages that are now removed then there's no need to do so.
Google is usually pretty good at understanding what is going on. This type of link really shouldn't cause you harm. With that being said, I would run the site through sucuri.net to look for malware as often hacked sites will be hosting malware. If Google determines that there is malware on the site then it will try not to send users your way and you'll get a malware warning in WMT.
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
-
What is the difference between 301 redirects and backlinks?
i have seen some 301 redirects on my site billsonline, can anyone please explain the difference between backlinks and 301 redirects, i have read some articles where the writer was stating that 301 are not good for website.
Technical SEO | | aliho0 -
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 -
Hundreds of 404 errors are showing up for pages that never existed
For our site, Google is suddenly reporting hundreds of 404 errors, but the pages they are reporting never existed. The links Google shows are clearly spam style, but the website hasn't been hacked. This happened a few weeks ago, and after a couple days they disappeared from WMT. What's the deal? Screen-Shot-2016-02-29-at-9.35.18-AM.png
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Backlink management: 301 redirect unsuccessful.
I am managing my company's spammy backlinks using Open Site Explorer. Our company owns a few URLs that are related to our company or are iterations of our main URL. All of these additional URLs have 301 redirects to our main domain. Open Site Explorer has identified one of these URLs as having a spam score of 8 indicating a 56% chance of Google crawler penalization. Obviously, this is a red flag. Instead of being redirected to our main domain upon visiting the URL, I was directed to what seems to be an automatically generated, generic webpage with links that seem to have been generated by keywords from our main domain. I have seen this type of webpage before when incorrectly typing in URLs from other pages. They tend to look the same. They have a black background with the URL written in grey at the top and a rectangular related links bar. Is anyone familiar with my problem and could you offer any advice? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SOLVISTA0 -
Links from PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) not appearing in backlinks for articles
Content from our medical journals gets indexed by the National Library of Medicine / PubMed on a monthly basis. The link to the full article appears in the upper-right corner on PubMed, yet I'm unable to find PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) backlinks in the reporting tools. Example:
Technical SEO | | aafpitadmin
Article Title: Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Children (allintitle query)
Article URL: http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html
PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21243988 The PubMed link is to http://www.aafp.org/link_out?pmid=21243988 ,
a 301 redirect to the article, http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html Any idea why this link isn't appearing in backlinks? This isn't just for one article, we have roughly 2,000 articles from 1998 to the present. Articles from the past 12-months are access-restricted, and after 12-months the articles become public.0 -
Backlinks Indexing
Is there a way of indexing my backlinks?? I have a lot backlinks but Google can't find them
Technical SEO | | CodePlus0 -
Some backlinks not getting picked up by OSE -- confused to why
I've had what has ended up being a nightmare SEO campaign. We have sunk a ton of time into link building for the site and saw little to no traction. Just as a test, I have the site on our portfolio as a site we designed years ago. The link to the site is old. Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit. http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html The backlink, and troubled campaign is www.spineandsportschiro.com There should be a few more links too that aren't getting picked up, especially the ones I have noticed using Whitespark local citation tool. Has Google got picky with all of this? How come this site seems to be getting no credit?
Technical SEO | | Boogily0 -
Backlinks to unique login pages
Hi There, This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help! The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform. For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with. Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields. So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this? Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL? Thanks in advance! Henry
Technical SEO | | hnydnn0