Spam pages / content created due to hack. 404 cleanup.
-
A hosting company's server was hacked and one of our customer's sites was injected with 7,000+ pages of fake, bogus, promotional content.
Server was patched and spammy content removed from the server.
Reviewing Google Webmaster's Tools we have all the hacked pages showing up as 404's and have a severe drop in impressions, rank and traffic. GWT also has 'Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links'...
What do you recommend for:
- Cleaning up 404's to spammy pages? (I am not sure redirect to home page is a right thing to do - is it?)
- Cleaning up links that were created off site to the spam pages
- Getting rank bank // what would you do in addition to the above?
-
You want those old spam pages to have a 410 code - gone (permanently). I'm not 100% sure how you will achieve this though... I'd speak to your hosting company and/or web developer.
404 code means the page is 'not found' which isn't the same as 410, which tells the search engines that the page has gone forever, so they won't keep looking for it.
Hope this helps!
Amelia
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
-
Http:// vs Https:// in Og:URL
Hi, Recently, we have migrated our website from http:// to https://. Now, every URL is in https:// and we have used 301 permanent redirection for redirecting OLD URL's to New Ones. We have planned to include http:// link in og:url instead of https:// due to some social share issues we are facing. My concern is, if Google finds the self http:// URL on every page of my blog, will Google gets confused with http and https:// as we are providing the old URL to Google for crawling. Please advice. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia0 -
Nofollow/Noindex Category Listing Pages with Filters
Our e-commerce site currently has thousands of duplicate pages indexed because category listing pages with all the different filters selected are indexed. So, for example, you would see indexed: example.com/boots example.com/boots/black example.com/boots/black-size-small etc. There is a logic in place that when more than one filter is selected all the links on the page are nofollowed, but Googlebot is still getting to them, and the variations are being indexed. At this point I'd like to add 'noindex' or canonical tags to the filtered versions of the category pages, but many of these filtered pages are driving traffic. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | fayfr0 -
Problem with Yoast not seeing any of this website's text/content
Hi, My client has a new WordPress site http://www.londonavsolutions.co.uk/ and they have installed the Yoast Premium SEO plug-in. They are having issues with getting the lights to go green and the main problem is that on most pages Yoast does not see any words/content – although there are plenty of words on the pages. Other tools can see the words, however Yoast is struggling to find any and gives the following message:- Bad SEO score. The text contains 0 words. This is far below the recommended minimum of 300 words. Add more content that is relevant for the topic. Readability - You have far too little content. Please add some content to enable a good analysis. They have contacted the website developer who says that there is nothing wrong, but they are frustrated that they cannot use the Yoast tools themselves because of this issue, plus Yoast are offering no support with the issue. I hope that one of you guys has seen this problem before, or can spot a problem with the way the site has been built and can perhaps shed some light on the problem. I didn't build the site myself so won't be offended if you spot problems with it. Thanks in advance, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
Redirect of https:// to http:// without SSL. Possible or not?!
Good afternoon, smart dudes : ) I am here to ask for your help. I posted this question on google help forum and stackoverflow, but looks like people do not know the correct answer... QUESTION: We used to have a secured site, but recently purchased a separate reservation software that provides SSL (takes clients to a separate secured website) where they can fill out the reservation form. We cancelled our SSL (just think its a waste to pay $100 for securing plain text). Now i have so many links pointing to our secured site and i have no idea how to fix it! How do i redirect https://www.mysite.comto http://www.mysite.com.Also would like to mention that i already have redirect from non www to www domain (not sure if that matters): RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]As i already mentioned....we do not have SSL!!!! None of those 301 redirect codes i found online work (you have to have SSL for the site to be redirected from https to http | currently i get an error - can't establish a secured connection to the server ). Is there anything i can do???? Or do i have to purchase SSL again?
Technical SEO | | JennaD140 -
Medium sizes forum with 1000's of thin content gallery pages. Disallow or noindex?
I have a forum at http://www.onedirection.net/forums/ which contains a gallery with 1000's of very thin-content pages. We've currently got these photo pages disallowed from the main googlebot via robots.txt, but we do all the Google images crawler access. Now I've been reading that we shouldn't really use disallow, and instead should add a noindex tag on the page itself. It's a little awkward to edit the source of the gallery pages (and keeping any amends the next time the forum software gets updated). Whats the best way of handling this? Chris.
Technical SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
CMS on autopilot is happily creating duplicate pages - advice?
Hi, our ecommerce CMS (Magento) is creating a bunch of pages with very little content and no user value like this: http://goo.gl/UU2vl This particular example is the by product of a product filtering page, which has the format www.mywebsite/explore/index/loaddata/id/10/. These pages have no content other than images - also the pages don't have page titles and are therefore being flagged in webmaster tools as requiring HTML improvements We also have CMS auto generated pages like this: www.mysite.comhttp/review/product/list/id/7 where the page is effectively a duplicate of the product page, and this is giving us pages being flagged by webmastertools as having duplicate title tags. Should we exclude these two type of page via robots.txt or take another approach, like not worry about them 🙂 many thanks, any help gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | w1ll1am0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0