Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Not found errors (404) due to being hacked
-
Hi Moz Guru's
Our website was hacked a few months ago, since then we have taken various measures, last one being redesigning the website all together and removing it from a WordPress platform. So far all is going well, except that the 404 not found errors keeps coming up in Google Webmaster tools. The URLs are spam pages that were created by the virus. And these spam pages have been indexed by Google, and now we are struggling to get rid of them.
Is there any way we can deal with these 404 spam pages links? Is marking all of them as fixed in the webmaster tools - search console- crawl errors helpful in any way? Can this have a negative impact on the SEO ?
Looking forward to your answers.
Many thanks.
-
I have a new client and just discovered on Open Site Explorer hundreds of links to ghost pages. The anchor text is stuff like Criminal Background Checks Las Vegas or Find Missing Persons.
I am not the webmaster. What advice should I give him?
Julie
-
Green Stone,
Thank you for your reply. At the moment we are manually trying to remove the links by using "Remove outdated content" tool whilst also creating a list of spammy links that might backlink to those spam pages we are removing, that were created by the virus.
Thank you.
-
Monica,
Sounds like you guys have taken the necessary steps to clean up the website and prevent it from occurring again. 404 spam links are a pain, that can often take some time to be removed from google's index all-together.
- A way to speed up the process is by changing the 404 status of these pages, and having it return a "410" error instead. This tells google it is a permanent non-existent page, and thus it will fall out of the index more quickly than a regular 404.
- In the meantime, if the number of 404 errors aren't overwhelming, you could try the "remove urls" tool within search console for these pages, which will temporarily remove them from the index all together. (emphasis on temporary)
- Marking them as fixed wouldn't be helpful, as the errors still exist, and would return to your search console not long after. (it certainly wouldn't harm your SEO, it just wouldn't be very helpful in this specific instance).
Hope that helps.
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
-
Shopify: AggregateRating Schema Error
Hi lovely community, I know google made some schema changes in Sept 2019. I got an AggregateRating Error:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
One of offers or review or aggregateRating should be provided. I am using a third-party app 'Shopify Product Review' to implement the rating. What I should do to solve this error. Thanks very much for the help! I found many people have this issue too in the community! Many thanks Pui0 -
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location error using pro-sitemaps.com
Hey, guys, We are using the pro-sitemaps.com tool to automate our sitemaps on our properties, but some of them give this error "This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location" for all the urls. Strange thing is that not all of them are with the error and most have all the urls indexed already. Do you have any experience with the tool and what is your opinion? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
LinkedIn 999 HTTP Errors
I am working on a website, https://linkedinforbusiness.net and a ton of 999 HTTP errors have only now surfaced. I would venture from reading the "Request denied" error in the log, LinkedIn means to block BLCs attempts to check those links. It might be because the site has a lot of LinkedIn links; maybe they find it suspicious that the server is sending a lot of requests for their links. How do you see this? Any fixes? What level of harm do you think it brings to the site? I have removed all similar links to LinkedIn from my site to avoid this (https://www.hillwebcreations.com). However, this isn't so easily done for LinkedIn For Business, as her work in all about helping businesses and individuals optimize their use of LinkedIn.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jessential0 -
Repeatedly target a rolling list of kws..or is that cannibalization? Biggest Confusion in SEO Ive found
Also suggesting a WBF topic. Ive read and researched with no luck here... would love a Moz staff reply too! Is it better to blog repeatedly on the same topic (writing multiple blogs around the topic of "content marketing" for example in hopes Google sees you as an authority on the topic over time) OR is this keyword cannibalization? Is it better to have one powerful and comprehensive page on a topic if it makes sense. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
404's - Do they impact search ranking/how do we get rid of them?
Hi, We recently ran the Moz website crawl report and saw a number of 404 pages from our site come back. These were returned as "high priority" issues to fix. My question is, how do 404's impact search ranking? From what Google support tells me, 404's are "normal" and not a big deal to fix, but if they are "high priority" shouldn't we be doing something to remove them? Also, if I do want to remove the pages, how would I go about doing so? Is it enough to go into Webmaster tools and list it as a link no to crawl anymore or do we need to do work from the website development side as well? Here are a couple of examples that came back..these are articles that were previously posted but we decided to close out: http://loyalty360.org/loyalty-management/september-2011/let-me-guessyour-loyalty-program-isnt-working http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/mark-johnson-speaks-at-motivation-show Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?
Hi, Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site? is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404? Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0