Alrogthimc penalty due to pharma hack that created drug links to home page. What to do?
-
Our site: Starcitylimo.com got destroyed by a pharma styled hack to their wordpress site. After having to re build the site from scratch to remove the virus, it was found that hundreds or even thousands of pharma links from overseas sites point to his home page (so we can't just 404 the pages).
Contacting the sites for removal does nothing. Added to dissavow 4 months ago did nothing. He's page 5 for every keyword he was position 5 or better for.
Is this one of those situations where its time to move on to a new domain?
-
No problem, it looks like you have a pretty involved project ahead of you. I would do a page level audit in GWT, Majestic and aHrefs. Be very careful which pages you 301.
If you want to be surgical - you can try getting good links changed to the new domain. That will be incredibly time consuming.
Regarding GWT reporting, I had a client that bought a link farm and did a blanket redirect... right smack into their root domain. Ouch. Luckily they had administrative control of said link farm - when the sitewide footer links were removed - it took about a month for GWT to remove them from link reports. Mileage may vary. Part of it depends on Google knowing it's not there - at least for the purposes of GWT reporting.
They had about 2,000,000+ backlinks. A lot of them were sitewides, another portion was article spam and blog spam. Some of it was just scraped. I wanted to remove at least 500,000 (just to be cautious) they only allowed 30K. But I got the link farm out of there. The site stabilized - but it was clear they needed to remove more. Such is life.
It would have been a great recovery story.
-
Thanks Travis, wow well I had never heard that about WMT. After reading countless link removal, penalty removal, SEO articles on moz and around the web I've never heard the download Google gives you isn't sufficient. I know it lags way behind others, but wow thats news people need to know.
It sounds like its time to move the site and move the good links we have with it then. More time is definitely not an option and with the majority being foreign spam, I don't believe we can control the link removal process successfully.
Thanks Again!
-
GWT definitely doesn't show you the whole picture. Majestic SEO won't show you the whole picture. Ahrefs or OSE can't show you the whole picture either.
Google has a pretty good idea of your link inventory. They share very little. In my understanding, the spreadsheet you download is just what they've shown you until it's no longer there.
No one set of link data is ever 100%. It's a big internet, but the one source that appears to generally share the least amount of data is Google. That's why you should use multiple sets of link data and do some spreadsheet wizardry to sort out the duplicates.
The general consensus regarding how long it takes to get a link penalty lifted is; "It takes as long as it takes." Some have taken up to a year and a few turned around fairly fast. Four months isn't exactly irregular.
Majestic is showing a lot of deleted links, so there's definitely some progress there. It's just hard to see the wheat from the chaff at a glance. Yeah, the backlink profile was hit hard.
Regarding the 404s... letting them 404 is just wasting crawl budget. It may be a good idea to 410 those and let the bots know those pages aren't there. In regard to what pages were dropped, you might have lost some pretty good links. I haven't done a page level audit, but losing good links with a ton of bad can delay the process as well.
Someone is going to chime in about the 'foundation' of links, and they would be correct. It's a whole other screed - so I'll leave it to them. Seriously, this one looks pretty nasty. Best of luck.
-
Hello Rob, as I mentioned hundreds of these links point to his home page. I have already changed the URL's and content on the other pages and let them 404.
If you search wordpress Pharma hack you can read all about it. But needless to say we fixed the hack, the problem is just the inbound links and the nasty algorithmic penalty that he has. The notice we got from Google that the site was compromised was removed 4 weeks ago, and rankings went from beyond page 10 to mostly page 5-6.
-
GTW backlinks is only 10% of Majestic? I've never seen this data before, and that would make zero sense if Google employees penalties on websites for links but does not provide the list of all the external links they find. I know the summary is all thats provided in GTW but the download is supposed to all inclusive, or so I have been lead to understand...
Either way, these links are IMPOSSIBLE to remove. So if Google webmaster Disavow doesn't actually work at removing penalties (algorithimic in nature) what then can we do?
-
Majestic SEO is still crawling thousands of 'new' bad links. I can't really say what Google bot is doing. I also don't know what domains you've disavowed.
The good news is, Majestic shows that it appears to be at least ebbing. I would revisit GWT backlinks and look for anything new. Know that you're barely getting 10% of the picture, if that.
I would hate to give up on a domain that's ten years old, but it looks like there's a little more history to understand. Plug it into SEM rush and slide the scale back to 'all time'.
-
Where are the links embedded? On the actual pages of your site (internal)? On the homepage? In the back-end of Wordpress (as you said it was a virus)??? Provide a little more detail and we may be able to find the right solution. Each of which would be different based on the various types of links going out to his site.
Thanks, Rob
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
-
Is it better to optimise for several keywords/keyword variations on one page, or create sub categories for those specific terms?
I've done a fair of research to try to find the answer to this, but different people seem to give very different opinions, and none of the info I could find is recent! I'm working with a company that produces a range of industrial products that fit into 6 main categories, within this categories, there are types of products and the products themselves. Prior to my involvement most of the content was added to the product pages and very little was added to the overall category page. The structure works like this: Electronic devices > type of device > products The 'type of device' category could be something like a switch, but within that category are 3/4 different switch types...leaving me with 11 or 12 primary keyword/phrases to aim for as each switch is searched for in more than one way. Should I try to rank for all of those terms using that one category page? Or should I change the structure to something like: Electronic devices > type of device > sub-category/specific variation of device > product This would mean creating a page for each variation to have a more accute focus for a small number of phrases..but it also means I've added another step between the home page and the products. Any advice is welcome! I'm worried I'm overthinking it!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adam_SEO_Learning0 -
Wondering if creating 256 new pages would cause duplicate content issues
I just completed a long post that reviews 16 landing page tools. I want to add 256 new pages that compare each tool against each other. For example: Leadpages vs. Instapage Leadpages vs. Unbounce Instapage vs. Unbounce, etc Each page will have one product's information on the left and the other on the right. So each page will be a unique combination BUT the same product information will be found on several other pages (its other comparisons vs the other 15 tools). This is because the Leadpages comparison information (a table) will be the same no matter which tool it is being compared against. If my math is correct, this will create 256 new pages - one for each combination of the 16 tools against each other! My site now is new and only has 6 posts/pages if that matters. Want to make sure I don't create a problem early on...Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martechwiz0 -
Why has my home page replaced my sub-category page for set of keywords? Happened 2x in last 2 weeks for day or so only to fix itself. What is going on?
Today I noticed a really weird problem. Our LED Step Lights page (https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html) has been replaced in the search results with our home page. See screenshot below. As I started to research what was going on, I noticed that this same thing must have happened on January 26 and 27 because in my Analytics I can see that our LED Step Lights sub-cat page had a sudden drop in traffic on those two days only to bounce back again on the 28th. See screenshot below. Our LED Step Lights page has had no changes in content, meta information, or anything in months. We have done no recent link building to this page in years. I don't understand what is going on. This is a popular page for us generating decent traffic. I really don't understand what is going on or even how to try and resolve this problem. I checked our Search Console. No messages. No manual web spam actions. Nothing to suggest that anything is going on except for the weird drops in traffic. Has anyone ever seen this happen before? Does anyone have any ideas as to what may be going on? serp-led-step-lights.png organic-traffic-drops.png search-console-led-step-lights.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cajohnson0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
Adding another keyword phrase to home page.
I finally reached the #1 ranking for my websites main keyword phrase. There are two more equally good keyword phrases that have my main two keywords plus one additional page. Can I shoot for both of those or should I limit it to just adding one more keyword phrase for a max of two? For Example. I rank #1 for Horse Buggies (our domain is the main two keywords) (Example) The other two equally good phrases with a little more traffic are Horse Large Buggies (I rank #29)and Horse Giant Buggies. (#46) What is the best way to start ranking for those terms....without saturating or cannabolizing my current terms? We are about to change the URL's on some of our pages...so maybe I could add Large and Giant to the URL. Any suggestions? I sure would like to capture the other two keyword phrases. #1 URL additions? ( I think this would just rank me higher for the new pages) #2 Would getting new links with those two new keyword phrases in the alt text help or is that black hat? #3 Adding more of those keyword phrases to my home page? Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
301'ing over 700 internal links to the main page
I just got a contract for a site. After I analyzed their website, I noticed that they have over 700 pages indexed. However, their internal linking structure sucks. It's basically all 700 pages in one directory. What do you recommend? I redirect all the internal structures to their new locations, or would it be better to redirect all those internal pages to their main domain name, and build a completely new seo-friendly structure? Redirecting their current pages to each individual page is gonna take a lotta time, and I don't think they're gonna pay for it. :l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | skgppa0 -
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page?
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page but only views it as one page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ibex0