Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?
-
Hi Guys,
I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection. The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected.
All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built. That was the easy part
The problems comes when I look on Webmaster. Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site. These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links.
I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings. Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively.
I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine.
Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty?
Thanks, Duncan
-
Piggybacking on Kane - since these bad/phantom pages were in one folder, can you request removal in Search Console? It should at least speed things up. Unfortunately, the links can show for weeks or months after they're removed, even if Google doesn't seem to be caching them. If the pages aren't indexed/cached, and the numbers in the console seem to be gradually dropping, I'm not sure if there's a lot more you can do, unfortunately.
-
Hey Duncan, sounds like you've covered the basics. If this had happened a month ago I'd tell you to wait it out, but since it's been 5 months it seems like it should have cleared up by now if it was simply a matter of waiting for Google to deindex everything.
I've put a note out to other associates on Moz Q&A to see if they have any suggestions.
-
We got a hacked site warning on Google results for the company Brand name....but nothing in the Search Console.
Performance is not exactly site wide - some pages only rank for exact match page title search term but not any variations... (e.g. Very Green widgets - page title - the site will rank for Very Green widgets but no variations e.g. Green widgets).
Other pages seem to be fine.... but none rank on page one.
It does seem those pages that had the most links pointing to them have been affected the worse. However, that said - there is a page that that has several 1000 internal spammy links showing but the page does rank ok and does rank for different keywords....another piece of the puzzle!
We checked rankings and at the time of the hack - the site definitely dropped.
Hope that helps!!
Duncan
-
Gotcha... It's fairly standard to see old links in Search Console that have long since been removed, so that concerns me less as long as the 404s are showing up properly and getting noindexed.
Did you receive any "hacked site" warnings in Search Console back in May?
As far as performance issues - is this sitewide, or does it just seem to be occurring on the pages that had the most links pointed at them? Do you still have any pages ranking in top 3 for a semi-competitive term? Out of the pages that did have spammy links to them, are any performing well - on page 1 for target keyword?
-
HI Kane
Thanks for your response! We did do a disavow just on some old directories which looked ok - but it was more of a precautionary measure.
CMS is now all good and secure.
The spammy links were a in subfolder which was deleted (creating 1000's of 404's). The website was then entirely moved to a new secure hosting environment.
Just on your questions...
Yes - the website was fine up until the hack.
The hack happened in May of this year.....a full clean up happened within 3 days after the attack.
Your last point.....yes - they are showing up as 404's. The website initially had 17,000 spammy 404 errors. Google has since reduced that to 3000. As these pages are removed from the index, this gives me hope that the problem is being resolved.
However - the strange part - even though the 404's are being reduced in Webmaster, the number of internal spammy links showing in the Console are not being reduced. It's static.
For example, the homepage shows 6,300 internal links. In reality it only has about a 120. The rest are all spammy (404) links. I do believe that this is causing ranking problems.....? Do you think that is right?
Thanks, Duncan
-
Hi Duncan,
Here's some initial thoughts on steps I would take:
- Since external links are fine, there shouldn't be a need to do anything disavow-related, but I would definitely do that if you see any external links pointed to those old pages, which is common with hacked sites.
- Sounds like you've covered your bases regarding preventing the site from getting hacked again at a CMS level, database level, plugin level, etc., so I'll assume that is good to go.
- If these spammy internal pages were all in a specific subfolder, you could block that subfolder via Robots.txt to send a stronger signal that the URLs should be ignored and de-indexed.
- The internal links should disappear as the pages are removed from the index, but that can take awhile, and it's not uncommon for Search Console to display pages/links/data that have since gone away.
And a couple of questions for you:
- Once those bases are covered, then you're still faced with the potential "penalty", or poor performance. I'm assuming that these pages not ranking in Google were performing well before the site hack?
- How long has it been since the site was initially hacked, and how long since full cleanup was completed?
- Are the spammy internal pages showing up as 404 crawl errors yet?
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
-
Hacked Websites (Doorways) Ranking First Page of Google
Hello Moz community! I could really use your help with some suggestions here with some recent changes I've noticed in the Google serps for terms I've been currently working on. Currently one of the projects I am working on is for an online pharmacy and noticed that the SERPs are being now taken up by hacked websites which look like doorways to 301 redirect to an online pharmacy the hacker wants the traffic to go to. Seems like they may be wordpress sites that are hacked and have unrelated content on their websites compared to online pharmacies. We've submitted these issues as spam to Google and within chrome as well but haven't heard back. When searching terms like "Canadian Pharmacy Viagra" and other similar terms we see this issue. Any other recommendations on how we can fix this issue? Thanks for your time and attached is a screenshot of the results we are seeing for one of our searches. 1Orus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | monarkg0 -
Exchange link from sites in same google account
Hi everyone, Anybody have experience when you have some websites which stored in Google Webmaster Tool and they exchange links between sites. So is it good for sites? We are hosted on different server. Thank you so much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | williamgoodseoagency.com0 -
Google +1s Quality Factors?
It is apparent that Google +1s are becoming an increasingly large factor in results pages and I had a few questions about some of the dynamics. Do +1s take into account factors such as c-blocks, location diversity based on IP, and similar elements? To what degree? Do +1s from well-diversified and historically more active/authoritative G+ accounts carry more weight than someone who simply has a G+ account because they use Gmail and were prompted? What is the spectrum here? How much weight would a +1 from Rand Fishkin hold in contrast to an account created one year ago with little activity? I know Google has a great deal of user data from Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Docs, search history and many more so would imagine this plays a role. Do +1s from newly created accounts that only target one business or niche cause damage? I am assuming that +1s should accumulate naturally just as backlinks so if what would be considered an unnatural amount of +1s in what time period? Any insights here are greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOGroup1230 -
Need some advise on using a micro site
I thought I would use a micro site with just some main product landing pages being used. I would use the same design and code as main site, then re-write the text and then link everything to the new site. “BUT” I'm concerned about getting a penalty (duplicate) as all the anchor text links going to the main site would be identical! EG. To use the same design as the main site I would need to use the same layout etc including navbars, anchor text links in the footer etc.. and I'm worried this may trigger a duplicate content penalty ? Any advise please
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | doorguy880 -
Link Wheel & Unnatural Links - Undoing Damage
Client spent almost a year with link wheels and mass link blasts - end result was getting caught by google. I have taken over, we;ve revamped the site and I'm finishing up with onsite optimization. Would anyone have any suggestions how to undo the damage of the unnatural links and get back into googles favour a little quicker? Or the best next steps to undo the damage.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ravynn0 -
How google treats RSS fetcher?
All I want to know how google treats RSS fetcher. I want to push my blogs to my own website. Both are there on the same domain . But I want them to be updated automatically on the home page of my website through RSS fetcher if i create it on my blog page. My site name is http://www.myrealdata.com and my blog site name is http://www.myrealdata.com/blog
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SangeetaC0 -
Ditching of spammy links - will it be of benefit?
Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'. Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions. I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full. Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | themegroup0