Google is showing erroneous results on SERPs page
-
Hello, All,
In April, two months ago, we caught a hack on a client's website. It created about 40 pages in what looked to be a black hat link tactic. We removed the pages, resubmitted the sitemap.xml (it reprocessed) and ran it through screaming frog to confirm all the pages were gone, but the forty pages still show up in the search results for a site search. We have both the www. and non www. version of sites claimed and set a preference. Nothing is awry with the robots.text. We're not really sure what to do to resolve it. We asked Google to recrawl (fetch) the site. I'm not sure what's going on with it.
The website's name is fortisitsolutions.com
The site search bringing up the pages from the hack is below.
site:www.fortisitsolutions.com
Any ideas?
-
It could be because of a large Google algorithm update or ranking flux; often, when the update has finished rolling out, then you might notice the difference in where the businesses ranks?
We sell garden offices, and we notice that the first page results on Google changes substantially during an algorithm update
-
Removing the pages will cause them to 404. Google will not instantly remove 404 pages, as sometimes website servers have issues and incorrectly return a 404 status on pages that are meant to be valid. As a result, Google will re-visit this page over a period of time and after seeing a repeated 404 is will remove it from its index.
The easiest option to speed this up, should be to use Google Search Console "Temporarily Hide" option in Google. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal
Pages will disappear quickly after using this and my guess is it won't come back if it's still returning a 404 status. If it's easy for you, you could turn the 404s to 410 (forever gone).
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
-
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Results clustered in blue below the main result
There are multiple results that appear in blue below the main result for a query from a particular domain. For example, if I search 'mobile phones online' on google.co.uk, the result field from www.dialaphone.co.uk shows me multiple results clustered in blue - 'HTC One Silver', 'Samsung', 'iPhone5S', 'Free Gifts'. I am trying to understand what these are, and why these show up. Ideally, I would like the results for my domain to show up in a similar fashion, and am wondering if there is something special that I would need to do in this regard. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | rjchugh0 -
10 Mobile Pages. 5 Desktop Pages. Canonnical to where?
I have a mobile site with more pages than the desktop site. Normally I would just point the page equivalents to the desktop site using the rel canonnical tag. What about the 5 pages? Do I just leave them be? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Imajery0 -
Dupelicate content home page and custom page question
I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9. As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles. The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc. Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page. I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings. AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table. Thanks for any advise on this.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
Should one page with markers or six separate pages?
Hi - I'm working on a site that was set up with 6 bios on one page, with markers jumping to each person's name. I was thinking about separating those into 6 different pages, but not sure if that's the right thing to do. Advice about keeping the bios on one page vs splitting them up? (Am I more likely to rank for those peoples' names if I have a unique page, or is the one page url with each different marker in it, just as good?) Ranking well for those names isn't a huge goal of the site, but it would be nice to make the choice that would help with that rank. Thanks for your input Emma
On-Page Optimization | | emmas0 -
Shall Google index a search result?
Hi, I've a website with about 1000 articles.Each article has one ore more keywords / tags. So I display these keywords at the article page and put a link to the intern search engine. (Like a tag cloud) The search engine lists als articles with the same keyword and creates a result page. This result page is indexed by Google. The search result contains the title of the article, a short description (150-300 chars.) and a link to the article. So, Google believes, that there are about 5.000 pages instead of 1.000 because auf the link to the search result pages. The old rule was for me: More pages in Google = better. But is this still true nowadays? Would be a "noindex, follow" better on these search result pages? (Is there a way to tell Google that this is a search result page?) Best wishes, Georg.
On-Page Optimization | | GeorgFranz0