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.
Google is indexing bad URLS
-
Hi All,
The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/
I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed:
1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs
2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt
3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool
4. Deleted the plugin
However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I
Thanks!
-
All of the plugins I can find allow the tag to be deployed on pages, posts etc. You pick from a pre-defined list of existing content, instead of just whacking in a URL and having it inserted (annoying!)
If you put an index.php at that location (the location of the 404), you could put whatever you wanted in it. Might work (maybe test with one). Would resolve a 200 so you'd then need to force a 410 over the top. Not very scalable though...
-
I do agree, I may have to pass this off to someone with more backend experience than myself. In terms of plugins, are you aware of any that will allow you to add noindex tags to an entire folder?
Thanks!
-
Hmm, that's interesting - it should work just as you say! This is the point where you need a developer's help rather than an SEO analysts :') sorry!
Google will revisit 410s if it believes there is a legitimate reason to do so, but it's much less likely to revisit them than it is with 404s (which actively tell Google that the content will return).
Plugins are your friends. Too many will overload a site and make it run pretty slowly (especially as PHP has no multi-threading support!) - but this plugin, you would only need it temporarily anyway.
You might have to start using something like PHPMyAdmin to browse your SQL databases. It's possible that the uninstall didn't work properly and there are still databases at work, generating fresh URLs. You can quash them at the database level if required, however I'd say go to a web developer as manual DB edits can be pretty hazardous to a non-expert
-
Thank you for all your help. I added in a directive to 410 the pages in my htaccess as so: Redirect 410 /revslider*/. However, it does not seem to work.
Currently, I am using Options All -Indexes to 404 the URLs. Although I still remain worried as even though Google would not revisit a 410, could it still initially index it? This seems to be the case with my 404 pages - Google is actively indexing the new 404 pages that the broken plugin is producing.
As I can not seem to locate the directory in Cpanel, adding a noindex to them has been tough. I will look for a plugin that can dynamically add it based on folder structure because the URLs are still actively being created.
The ongoing creation of the URL's is the ultimate source of the issue, I expected that deleting the plugin would have resolved it but that does not seem to be the case.
-
Just remember, the only regex character which is supported is "*". Others like "" and "?" are not supported! So it's still very limited. Changing the response from 404 to 410 should really help, but be prepared to give Google a week or two to digest your changes
Yes, it would be tricky to inject those URLs with Meta no index tags, but it wouldn't be impossible. You could create an index.php file at the directory of each page which contained a Meta no-index directive, or use a plugin to inject the tag onto specific URLs. There will be ways, don't give up too early! That being said, this part probably won't add much more than the 410s will
It wouldn't be a bad idea to inject the no-index tags, but do it for 410s and not for 404s (doing it for 404s could cause you BIG problems further down the line). Remember, 404 - "temporarily gone but will come back", 410 - "gone - never coming back". Really all 410s should be served with no-index tags. Google can read dynamically generated content, but is less likely to do so and crawls it less often. Still - it would at least make the problem begin shrinking over time. It would be better to get the tags into to non-modified source code (server side rendering)
By the way, you can send a no-index directive in the HTTP header if you are really stuck!
https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/robots-hints/noindex-in-html-and-http-header/
The above post is quite helpful, it shows no-index directives in HTML but also in the HTTP header
In contrast to that example, you'd be serving 410 (gone) not 200 (ok)
-
Thank you for your response! I will certainly use the regex in my robots.txt and try to change my Htaccess directive to 410 the pages.
However, the issue is that a defunct plugin is randomly creating hundreds of these URL's without my knowledge, which I can not seem to access. As this is the case, I can't add a no-index tag to them.
This is why I manually de-indexed each page using the GSC removal tool and then blocked them in my robots.txt. My hope was that after doing so, Google would no longer be able to find the bad URL's.
Despite this, Google is still actively crawling & indexing new URL's following this path, even though they are blocked by my robots.txt (validated). I am unsure how these URL's even continue to be created as I deleted the plugin.
I had the idea to try to write a program with javascript that would take the status code and insert a no-index tag if the header returned a 404, but I don't believe this would even be recognized by Google, as it would be inserted dynamically. Ultimately, I would like to find a way to get the plugin to stop creating these URL's, this way I can simply manually de-index them again.
Thanks,
-
You have taken some good measures there, but it does take Google time to revisit URLs and re-index them (or remove them from the index!)
Did you know, 404 just means a URL was temporarily removed and will be coming back? The status code you are looking to serve is 410 (gone) which is a harder signal
Robots.txt (for Google) does in-fact support wild cards. It's not full regex, in-fact the only wildcard supported is "*" (asterisk: matching any character or string of characters). You could supplement with a rule like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /*revslider* That should, theoretically block any URL from indexation if it contains the string "revslider" Be sure to **validate** any new robots.txt rules using Google Search Console to check they are working right! Remember that robots.txt affects crawling and **not indexation!** To give Google a directive not to index a URL, you should use the Meta no-index tag: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en) **The steps are:**
- Remove your existing robots.txt rule (which would stop Google crawling the URL and thus stop them seeing a Meta no-index tag or any change in status code)
- Apply status 410 to those pages instead of 404
- Apply Meta no-index tags to the 410'ing URLs
- Wait for Google to digest and remove the pages from its index
- Put your robots.txt rule back to prevent it ever happening again
- Supplement with an additional wildcard rule
- Done!
- 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
-
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
Technical SEO | | SS.Digital0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?
hello Moz We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
Technical SEO | | joony
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above) We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess. How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it? Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint) Thank you in advance for your reply.0 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
Why do some URLs for a specific client have "/index.shtml"?
Reviewing our client's URLs for a 301 redirect strategy, we have noticed that many URLs have "/index.shtml." The part we don'd understand is these URLs aren't the homepage and they have multiple folders followed by "/index.shtml" Does anyone happen to know why this may be occurring? Is there any SEO value in keeping the "/index.shtml" in the URL?
Technical SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750