Website blog is hacked. Whats the best practice to remove bad urls
-
Hello
So our site was hacked which created a few thousand spam URLs on our domain. We fixed the issue and changed all the spam urls now return 404. Google index shows a couple of thousand bad URLs.
My question is-
What's the fastest way to remove the URLs from google index. I created a site map with sof the bad urls and submitted to Google. I am hoping google will index them as they are in the sitemap and remove from the index, as they return 404.
Any tools to get a full list of google index? ( search console downloads are limited to 1000 urls). A Moz site crawl gives larger list which includes URLs not in Google index too. Looking for a tool that can download results from a site: search.
Any way to remove the URLs from the index in bulk? Removing them one by one will take forever.
Any help or insight would be very appreciated.
-
Technically 404 means "temporarily unavailable but coming back later" so you might want to consider Status 410 instead of 404. You could also supplement it with Meta no-index, if you can't use the HTML implementation then fire the no-index directive through the HTTP header using X-robots:
https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag (scroll down a little to find the relevant part)
E.g:
"HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 21:42:43 GMT
(…)
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
(…)"... something like that.
You can't use Search Console to remove URLs from Google at all. The remove URL tool, only removes URLs one at a time and it only does so 'temporarily', the URLs pop back again after a bit. The best thing you can do is give Google some harsher directives and hope they listen, in a month or two most of those should be gone
Don't use robots.txt on the URLs as, if Google can't crawl them it won't find the 410s or the no-index directives
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
-
What is the best tool for getting a SiteMap url for a website with over 4k pages?
I have just migrated my website from HUGO to Wordpress and I want to submit the sitemap to Google Search Console (because I haven't done so in a couple years). It looks like there are many tools for getting a sitemap file built. But I think they probably vary in quality. Especially considering the size of my site.
Technical SEO | | DanKellyCockroach2 -
Dealing with broken internal links/404s. What's best practice?
I've just started working on a website that has generated lots (100s) of broken internal links. Essentially specific pages have been removed over time and nobody has been keeping an eye on what internal links might have been affected. Most of these are internal links that are embedded in content which hasn't been updated following the page's deletion. What's my best way to approach fixing these broken links? My plan is currently to redirect where appropriate (from a specific service page that doesn't exist to the overall service category maybe?) but there are lots of pages that don't have a similar or equivalent page. I presume I'll need to go through the content removing the links or replacing them where possible. My example is a specific staff member who no longer works there and is linked to from a category page, should i be redirecting from the old staff member and updating the anchor text, or just straight up replacing the whole thing to link to the right person? In most cases, these pages don't rank and I can't think of many that have any external websites linking to them. I'm over thinking all of this? Please help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Adam_SEO_Learning0 -
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog.
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.
Technical SEO | | arun.negi0 -
URL Structure
Hi, Hope you are all well. On our website we have a 'blog' and a 'news' section. The blog is located on "/blog" - but when you click on a post the url structure changes to /name-of-article and the blog subdomain isn't included. Would it be better to have "blog/name-of-article as this would then make the blog perform better in search results? Also, if our news page is under /news - but when you click on an article it changes to /news-article/name-of-article Wouldn't it be better to have /news/name-of-article Thanks a lot!! 🙂
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
What's the best Blogging platform
A year ago an SEO specialist evaluated my Wordpress site and said she had seen lower rankings for Wordpress sites--in general. We moved our site off any cms and design in html 5. Our blog, however, is still on Wordpress. I'm thinking about moving to the Ghost platform b/c I only a blog. The drawbacks are one author, no recent post lists, no meta tags. Is it worth it to move the site off Wordpress. Will it affect my rankings much if I have great content? Does anyone have experience with or opinions on Ghost?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Starting a Blog and URL Structure Advice
Hello SEOmoz Community, We are going to start a blog on our website and have a slight dilemma. Our site is a .Net site and the blog platform we've chosen (BlogEngine) only allows us to use the following url structure: www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name. We've looked at other .Net blog software and this one meets all of our needs except for the ideal URL Structure. We would like to remove the /post/ directory; however have not technically found a way to do it. We wanted to get some opinions on whether or not we should just start with this URL structure and not worry about the extra directory, or work to find another solution that eliminates this extra directory. Ideally we want to keep the posts as close to the root as possible for link juice distribution, and the extra directory could get in the way. Also, if anyone has any advice on a more flexible .Net blog platform, suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We thank you so much in advance for your time and help.
Technical SEO | | All-Star-Vacation-Homes0 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Old Blog
I have an old blog that I started long ago and it has tons of content. I'm thinking about migrating it my current blog but am worried about panda and bringing over mediocre content. The content is fine, not bad not good. Should I bring it over or should I just delete the blog?
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0