After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
-
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there.
How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped.
Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
-
Google Search Console actually has a URL removal tool built into it, unfortunately it's not really scaleable (mostly it's one at a time submissions) and in addition to that the effect of using the tool is only temporary (the URLs come back again)
In your case I reckon' that changing the status code of the 'gone' URLs from 404 ("temporarily not found, but will be returning soon") to 410 ("GONE!") might be a good idea. Google might digest that better as it's a harder indexation directive and a very strong crawl directive ("go away, don't come back!")
You could also serve the Meta no-index directive on those URLs. Obviously you're unlikely to have access to the HTML of non-existent pages, but did you know Meta no-index can also be fired through x-robots, through the HTTP header? So it's not impossible
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/404
(Ctrl+F for "X-Robots-Tag HTTP header")
Another option is this form to let Google know outdated content is gone, has been removed, and isn't coming back:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
... but again, URLs one at a time is going to be mega-slow. It does work pretty well though (at least in my experience)
In any eventuality I think you're looking at, a week or two for Google to start noticing in a way that you can see visually - and then maybe a month or two until it rights itself (caveat: it's different for all sites and URLs, it's variable)
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's Knowledge Panel
Hi Moz Community. Has anyone noticed a pattern in the websites that Google pulls in to populate knowledge Panels? For example, for a lot of queries Google keeps pulling data from a specific source over and over again, and the data shown in the Knowledge Panel isn't on the target page. Is it possible that Google simply favors some sites over others and no matter what you do, you'll never make it into the Knowledge box? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Massive URL Migration with thousands of 301
Hey Everyone! I'm currently working on a project that we have A Lot of product pages and we have thousands of URL's that need to be 301'd over. I know this can be a major issue and could lead to tons of errors. What is everyone's thought of doing such a huge Migration, Should I do it all in phases? or should I do them all at once so they can all be indexed together? What would you suggest to be the best way to go about doing such a massive migration?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
Google Not Seeing My 301's
Good Morning! So I have recently been putting in a LOT of 301's into the .htaccess, no 301 plugins here, and GWMT is still seeing a lot of the pages as soft 404's. I mark them as fixed, but they come back. I will also note, the previous webmaster has ample code in our htaccess which is rewriting our URL structure. I don't know if that is actually having any effect on the issue but I thought I would add that. All fo the 301's are working, Google isn't seeing them. Thanks Guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Are clean mobile URL's necessary?
Adding code to redirect/clean up ugly URL's slows down mobile site performance, so it is necessary if we are already using rel=alternate tags on our desktop/www pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Will Canonical tag on parameter URLs remove those URL's from Index, and preserve link juice?
My website has 43,000 pages indexed by Google. Almost all of these pages are URLs that have parameters in them, creating duplicate content. I have external links pointing to those URLs that have parameters in them. If I add the canonical tag to these parameter URLs, will that remove those pages from the Google index, or do I need to do something more to remove those pages from the index? Ex: www.website.com/boats/show/tuna-fishing/?TID=shkfsvdi_dc%ficol (has link pointing here)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf
www.website.com/boats/show/tuna-fishing/ (canonical URL) Thanks for your help. Rob0 -
Good Morning America Appearance - Search Rankings Down
We had some products on the Steals and Deals segment of Good Morning America. The same day we received a message from Google in Webmaster Tools (below). The message says that search result clicks have increased significantly. It seems like this was almost a warning that they were not sure this was valid. The promotion included a link from the good morning america site on yahoo to a subdomain on our site. The rankings have fallen a good little bit since and in Webmaster tools, there are no links to our site listed and no internal links and no content keywords for the site. Is this is a temporary freeze on our site until they figure out if this is manipulative? I would have thought a link from Good Morning America would be great for SEO. Search results clicks for http://www.justjen.com/ have increased significantly. This message is not indicative of any problem in your site. It is simply to inform you that the number of clicks that one of your pages receives has increased recently. If you have just added new content, this may indicate that it has become more popular on Google. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
Google suddenly indexing and displaying URLs that haven't existed for years?
We recently noticed google is showing approx 23,000 indexed .jsp urls for our site. These are ancient pages that haven't existed in years and have long been 301 redirected to valid urls. I'm talking 6 years. Checking the serps the other day (and our current SEOMoz pro campaign), I see that a few of these urls are now replacing our correct ones in the serps for important, competitive phrases. What the heck is going on here? Is Google suddenly ignoring rewrite rules and redirects? Here's an example of the rewrite rules that we've used for 6+ years: RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] Now, this 'bottom paint' url has been incredibly stable in the serps for over a half decade. All of a sudden, a google search for 'bottom paint' (no quotes) brings up the jsp page at position 2-3. This is just one example of something very bizarre happening. Has anyone else had something similar happen lately? Thank You <colgroup><col width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamestown
| RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] |0 -
Indexed non existent pages, problem appeared after we 301d the url/index to the url.
I recently read that if a site has 2 pages that are live such as: http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/ will come up as duplicate if they are both live... I read that it's best to 301 redirect the http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. I read that this helps avoid duplicate content and keep all the link juice on one page. We did the 301 for one of our clients and we got about 20,000 errors that did not exist. The errors are of pages that are indexed but do not exist on the server. We are assuming that these indexed (nonexistent) pages are somehow linked to the http://www.url.com/index The links are showing 200 OK. We took off the 301 redirect from the http://www.url.com/index page however now we still have 2 exaact pages, www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. What is the best way to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0