Disavow links and domain of SPAM links

[ahming777]

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

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[Dr-Pete]

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.

[ahming777]

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.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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