[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console

[rmehta1]

I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too):

Here's how they show up:

Example 1:

1. URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2
2. Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html

Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data):

1. URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/

2. Linked From:

3. www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site)

4. http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html

Example 3:

1. URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html
2. Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html

How do I address this issue?

[CleverPhD]

Here is what I would do

1. Disavow the domain that is linking to you from the adult site(s).

2. The fact that Google search console is showing that you have an internal page linking as well makes me want to know a) have you always owned this domain and maybe someone previously did link internally like this or b) you may have been or are hacked

In the case of b) this can be really tricky.  I once had a site that in a crawl it was showing sitewide links to various external sites that we should not be linking to. When I looked at the internal pages via my browser, there was no link as far as I could see even though it showed up on the crawler report.

Here was the trick. The hacker had setup a script to only show the link when a bot was viewing the page. Plus, we were running mirrored servers and they had only hacked one server. So, the links only showed up when you were spidering a specific mirrored instance as a bot.

So thanks to the hacking, not only were we showing bad links to bad sites, we were doing this through cloaking methodology. Two strikes against us. Luckily we picked this up pretty quick and fixed immediately.

Use a spidering program or browser program to show a user agent of Googlebot and go visit your pages that are linking internally. You might be surprised.

Summary

Googlebot has a very long memory. It may be that this was an old issue that was fixed long ago. If that was the case, just show the 404s for the pages that do not exist, and disavow the bad domain and move on. Make sure that you have not been hacked as this would also be why this is showing.

Regardless, the fact that Google did find it at one point, you need to make sure you resolve. Pull all the URLs into a spreadsheet and run Screaming Frog in list mode to check them all to make sure you fix all of it.

[rmehta1]

Yep.. Looking if anyone can help with this..

[LoganRay]

Oh yea, I missed that. That's very strange, not sure how to explain that one!

[rmehta1]

Thanks for the response Logan. What you are saying definitely makes sense.. But it makes think why do I see something like Example 2 under Crawl errors. Why Google Search Console shows linked from as 2 URL - one the spammy site's and other is from my own website. How is that even possible?

[LoganRay]

I've seen similar situations, but never in bulk and not with adult sites. Basically what's happening is somehow a domain (or multiple) are linking to your site with inaccurate URLs. When bots crawling those sites find the links pointing to yours, they obviously hit a 404 page which triggers the error in Search Console.

Unfortunately, there's not too much you can do about this, as people (or automated spam programs) can create a link to any site and any time. You could disavow links from those sites, which might help from an SEO perspective, but it won't prevent the errors from showing up in your Crawl Error report.