Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
-
Hi,
I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers.
This is how they do it:
1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS.
2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites.
3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name.
4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites.
What I have done currently:
1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts.
2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week.
Problem now is:
When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google.
Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google.
Question:
1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this?
2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow?
3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues?
Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword
-
I'm afraid there's no easy answer. The security side is beyond the scope of Q&A (it's just too dependent on your platform/host/etc.), but locking that down is definitely the biggest and first step. Obviously, though, you can't stop third-party sites from getting hacked.
Disavow can be done at the domain level. There are some oddities, like Wordpress.com (where sub-domains act more like stand-alone domains), but for most sites, if most links are malicious, lock down the entire incoming domain.
Make sure your core links are clean. If you have a solid base of links, and you're not dealing with a lot of quality issues, it's tough for these kinds of hacked links to cause as much harm. Google knows this happens. Unfortunately, if your core link profile is a mess or week, then it's a lot easier to take damage. So, this is a battle on two fronts - stop the attack and, at the same time, clean up your core link profile and strengthen it as best you can.
There are a lot of link removal tools now, but honestly, they're a starting point. You need to dig in and evaluate what they give you, so that you're not taking out links that are potentially good. Right now, this is a labor-intensive process, I'm afraid.
-
Hi Andy,
Am currently gathering data from Webmaster Tools.
No, I didn't get any manual actions message from Google.
I do have a list. Am trying to use Kerboo (LinkRisk) to manage it. However, I have little time to do this.
-
Hi,
2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow?
Yes, I would be disavowing at a domain level (not even subdomain) with a view to blocking everything you find.
How have you been gathering link data? Webmaster Tools? Ahrefs? Majestic? OSE?
Ideally you need to create one master list of everything you can find and start from there. It isn't going to be a quick fix though because if you have been caught by Penguin, you wont get out of any penalty until it is re-run again. All you can do is prepare for when that run happens.
If you haven't yet been caught by Penguin, then you would be saving yourself a lot of worry by getting this resolved before the next refresh happens.
-Andy
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
-
Sitemap links
Hi, I´m running a sitemap using pro-sitemaps and I find several pages that shouldn´t be listed. How do I find how are these pages being generated? Can´t find the links the robot is following to get to those pages..
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
Does a sub-domain benefit a domain...
I have seen some mixed comment as the whether a sub-domain would benefit from the authority built up by its domain... but does a domain benefit from a sub-domain?
Technical SEO | | Switch_Digital0 -
Disavowing links, Is it effective?
Looking for your experiences with disavowing back-links? We've been flooded with new clients who need spammy link removal services and wanted to hear more about your experience with the disavow tool. For sites that have been penalized, how long did it take for them to come back using the disavow tool? Did you see sites come back after the next algo update? Here's the basics of our services for link deletion: 1. Find all the spammy links
Technical SEO | | Keith-Eneix
2. Contact webmasters to delete them
3. Disavow all spammy links that are part of an obvious network
4. Implement a content plan for new quality links to get the site healthy again.
5. Report on all links removed and new links attained Just want to make sure our processes are in line with what everyone else is doing?0 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Webmaster Tools Manual Actions - Should I Disavow Spammy Links??
My website has a manual action against it in webmaster tools stating; Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole I have checked the link profile of my site and there are over 4,000 spammy links from one particular website which I am guessing this manual action refers to. There is no way that I will be able to get these links removed so should I be using Google's Disavow Tool or is there no need? Any ideas would be appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Clickable links in video?
Hi, I am creating a website for mobile devices and have planned to use videos at certain places. I want to have a clickable url inserted at the end of the video. Any suggestions how may i do it? Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
2 home page domains causing split in link juice
We have 2 home page domains that are resulting in a split in links. We have mysite.com and mysite.com/index.php. The site is on Joomla and when we try and re-direct the /index.php to just mysite.com is causing an infinite loop. I have done this on other platforms with no problems - is this an issue because of Joomla? How can we complete a 301 re-direct to consolidate our link juice to one domain url?
Technical SEO | | devonkrusich0 -
Old owners links pointing to new owners domain
We have a number of web sites. We recently acquired an excellent domain name, it happened to be owned by one of our competitors. Our competitor has a lot of web sites, each domain having a basic 5 page unoptimized site with one of those pages little more than a link farm. They have over three hundred domains with all but lets say 10 of them consisting of basic 5 page sites with a link "directory" on one of those pages. - the directory page is the same on every single site/domain. One of the links from that directory is going to our newly acquired domain and newly optimized web site. Being new to this, should this pose any kind of concern for us? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | PlasticCards0