Client suffered a malware attack. Removed links not being crawled by Google!
-
Hi all,
My client suffered a malware attack a few weeks ago where an external site somehow created 700 plus links on my clients site with their content. I removed all of the content and redirected the pages to the home page. I then created a new temporary xml sitemap with those 700 links and submitted the sitemap to Google 9 days ago. Google has crawled the sitemap a few times but not the individual links. When I click on the crawl report for the sitemap in GSC, I see that the individual links still have the last crawled date from before they were removed. So in Googles eyes, that old malicioud content still exists.
What do I do to ensure Google knows the contnt is gone and redirected?
Thanks!
-
I'm sorry to hear that that happened to you.
I'm assuming that you do not have a backup?
if you do have a backup obviously could return your site to normal but let's base this question on the idea that you do not have a backup.
what I would do is make sure that that site is cleaned up professionally if you do it through this Sucuri I can tell you through first-hand experience they do an excellent job & will back the work for one year and it sounds like you have a pretty nasty bit of malware on your site. Go here and you can have the site crawled and it will tell you a little bit more about what has infected the site and then you can purchase one of their plans to have your site
https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ this is a free check of the site I am sure you'll see that you had some sort of malware injection.
This is where you go to purchase the plan that best fits your budget and your needs. All of the plans will remove the hack from your site and remove any blacklists
https://sucuri.net/website-security-platform/signup/
This is 100% platform-independent and will give you a very powerful firewall for free with the service for the next year as well. This will prevent your site from being attacked in the same manner it was before.
I wish I had a free solution to offer you but this is the closest thing and it's definitely cheaper than hiring a developer to try to figure out whether it's a really bad attack or just something minor you want to make sure. all those back doors are closed.
I hope this is of help to you,
Tom
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 rejected my reconsideration request of unnatural link manual action, and list one blog article twice as example?
Hi Moz Community, On April 22 my site received a manual action in Google Webmaster telling me it's caused by unnatural links. After some a deep cleaning of all the sitewide links, which I think is the major problem of my external links, I requested a reconsideration request on May 4. And Google rejected my reconsideration request of unnatural link manual action on May 29, and list one blog article twice as example, which is quite weird to me. Is it normal for Google to list one URL twice as example in the feedback? I don't quite see the reason for that. Does anybody have any idea about that? This is really quite frustrating to me. And to be honest, I don't see much problems about the article Google listed as well. Yeah it's all about our product and it has 3 do-follow links to our site. But it contains no words such as sponsor, advertisement, or rewards... And the blog itself is quite healthy as well. The post also get rather high engagement, with organic comments and shares. How did Google flag that out? I don't think it's possible that Google will go into all our site links one by one... Hope you guys can help me with that. Thanks in advance! Ben
Technical SEO | | Ben_fotor0 -
Why Google crawl parameter URLs?
Hi SEO Masters, Google is indexing this parameter URLs - 1- xyz.com/f1/f2/page?jewelry_styles=6165-4188-4184-4192-4180-6109-4191-6110&mode=li_23&p=2&filterable_stone_shapes=4114 2- xyz.com/f1/f2/page?jewelry_styles=6165-4188-4184-4192-4180-4169-4195&mode=li_23&p=2&filterable_stone_shapes=4115&filterable_metal_types=4163 I have handled by Google parameter like this - jewelry_styles= Narrows Let Googlebot decide mode= None Representative URL p= Paginates Let Googlebot decide filterable_stone_shapes= Narrows Let Googlebot decide filterable_metal_types= Narrows Let Googlebot decide and Canonical for both pages - xyz.com/f1/f2/page?p=2 So can you suggest me why Google indexed all related pages with this - xyz.com/f1/f2/page?p=2 But I have no issue with first page - xyz.com/f1/f2/page (with any parameter). Cononical of first page is working perfectly. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Prajapati
Rajesh0 -
How do you link your adaptive mobile site to Google Analytics?
With Google now saying they're putting a lot more emphasis on mobile sites, we recently got notifications from Google Webmaster Tools saying that some of our pages are not built for mobile. Some of these pages, however have an adaptive page that when you visit from a mobile phone (m.mysite.com), you're taken to instead of the desktop version. My question is, how do I let Google know that I have an adaptive site and not get penalized for poor mobile usability? I already have Google Analytics on the mobile site, I just need to somehow let Webmaster tools / Google's web crawlers know that they should be looking to my mobile site for usability, not the desktop site. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Internal link structure, find out if there are any internal links to this page
When i use this url in open site explorer it says that there are no internal links:
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
http://goo.gl/d2s6tJ
Page Authority is also 1, it should be higher of there are any internal links to it right? But i am very sure there are links to this url on my website. For example on this URL:
http://goo.gl/ucixRH How certain can i be of this? Because if i can be very certain, than we have a internal linkstructure problem on our entire site i believe.0 -
Google adding strings to meta title in SERPs => Driving my client crazy!
Fellow Mozzers, I'm really baffled by Google's behaviour adding strings before my meta title in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | TheReference
This behaviour seems random, but it mainly happens on queries that trigger the homepages (multilingual .com domain).
I'm aware of meta title guidelines concerning length, and I know that Google may insert strings if it thinks it could benefit the user.
But clearly their "aid" is not helpful at all... Client is really anxious to get this resolved and we're stumped on what could be the cause for this... Some examples: Query: https://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&pws=0&q=Ogone - Online payment gateway
Result title: en-gb - Ogone - Online payment gateway
Normal title: Ogone - Online payment gateway Query: https://www.google.at/#hl=de&q=Ogone Online Payment Service Provider
Result title: ogone.at - Ogone. Online Payment Service Provider & e-payment ...
Normal title: Ogone. Online Payment Service Provider & e-payment Deutschland
=> For longer titles it will just prepend strings, and leave out our piece of the meta title Query: https://www.google.nl/#hl=nl&pws=0&q=Support Ogone
Result: Support | Ogone
=> For very short titles, Google doesn't add anything, why does it so for the other results? I really don't understand why this happens. The titles are long enough (but not too long), no strange characters inserted. Please, please help. Thanks in advance! Nikolaas0 -
Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn811 -
Nofollow link passing link juice
Can a link which is nofollwed pass link juice ? Please see the discussion at - http://www.seomoz.org/q/if-multiple-links-on-a-page-point-to-the-same-url-and-one-of-them-is-no-followed-does-that-impact-the-one-that-isn-t
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google crawl index issue with our website...
Hey there. We've run into a mystifying issue with Google's crawl index of one of our sites. When we do a "site:www.burlingtonmortgage.biz" search in Google, we're seeing lots of 404 Errors on pages that don't exist on our site or seemingly on the remote server. In the search results, Google is showing nonsensical folders off the root domain and then the actual page is within that non-existent folder. An example: Google shows this in its index of the site (as a 404 Error page): www.burlingtonmortgage.biz/MQnjO/idaho-mortgage-rates.asp The actual page on the site is: www.burlingtonmortgage.biz/idaho-mortgage-rates.asp Google is showing the folder MQnjO that doesn't exist anywhere on the remote. Other pages they are showing have different folder names that are just as wacky. We called our hosting company who said the problem isn't coming from them... Has anyone had something like this happen to them? Thanks so much for your insight!
Technical SEO | | ILM_Marketing
Megan0