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I've seen this happen several times and the first thing to do is really clean out your site first. I'd recommend Sucuri.net to do a thorough malware cleanup. Their free plugin isn't enough, you need to go with the paid version. Are you on WordPress? I've seen this happen to 4 sites already I've helped.

Then, let all the errors 404. If you 301 them then the bad pages and links will stay alive longer. Even better to let them 410, but 404 should do the trick. I wrote about some of the reasons behind those in a post here on Moz a few years ago that still applies.

Matt Cutts has a good reply on disavowing spam links in his video here, and says:

"If you're at all stressed, if you're worried, if you're not able to sleep at night because you think Google might have something, or might see it, or we might get a spam report about you, or there might be some misunderstanding or an algorithm might rank your site lower, I would feel free to just go ahead and disavow those links as well,"

I went ahead and disavowed the DOMAINS of the most recent site, just to be extra sure. Let me know if you have follow up questions!

I don't have personal experience optimizing for the Chinese market, but I do have experience with Cloudflare. They recently announced a partnership with Baidu to tackle this problem regarding the Great Firewall.

"The combined network also improves the viewing experience for visitors inside and outside of China. After enabling the China network, visitors to CloudFlare sites from within China are served from Baidu’s network of data centers, while visitors from outside of China continue to be served from the CloudFlare network. The result is a decrease in application latency of greater than 200 milliseconds for China traffic."

Would definitely check out https://www.cloudflare.com/china and talk to their support team about solutions to your load time, that's the best be in my opinion.

For clarification, are these additional blog post categories that are being added? Or are these just ideas for styles of posts? Or are these the only accepted styles moving forward? Or are these just types of posts that you guys want more of? Thanks!

There was a similar question asked in 2011, and I would think that according to the most recently Local Search Ranking Factors that it would still apply today.

Definitely check out this answer from Keith, but I'll quote him here for you:

"Regarding point #1, that is definitely a myth - we frequently secure local numbers and redirect these to call centres/800 numbers etc - we're sure that Google can closely associate a regular number with a geographic region, but until they start interrogating the Telco's (which I think even the Big G might struggle with) picking up a redirected number seems to be off their radar.

In relation to #2, according to our own research, experience, results and with a little help from David Mihm's "Local Search Ranking Factors" you need to honor the NAP "holy trinity" - consistency across all citations (including your clients' website numbers) for Name, Address and Phone is critical to success in local. Not just similar - exact right down to capitalization and spaces...so, if you can't change the 800 numbers (which would be better for Google Places but probably not ideal from a public/consumer perspective) then use the 800 numbers together with Address and Name everywhere - eventually Google will associate the 800 number with the geo location and you and your client will be happy."

The overall idea is that you can use local numbers that reroute to an 800 number. It's best if you can also have your local number on your website or some local landing pages on your website, but if that's not possible, having the local number on the NAP listings is still better than an 800 number.

I would definitely disavow all of the pharma links, but make sure your code really is clean on your site. I've worked with 3 sites so far that had the same thing happen, and although they were on WP like you mentioned you don't have, it's possible your site was still infiltrated.

Sign up for Sucuri.net or Wordfence premium and have them look at your site - definitely worth the cost of those subscriptions.

Yes you can redirect the 3 URLs to the new product page and everything would be alright.

The question to consider though, would be if you had tens of thousands of product pages and so then would need tens of thousands of redirects. If the old pages did not get much or any traffic, or just the popup URL was hardly ever visited, it might not make sense to implement the redirects. Those redirects could slow down portions of your server or site while processing those redirects.

Essentially if you had a bunch of old pages that were just never useful, let them 404. If they were useful and linked to or in the index, then 301 redirect to the new page.

Hope that helps?

Highland brings up some great points that I agree with. I definitely am learning as well that for some clients that are larger and has an in-house team that you support as an SEO, they might just want you to focus on SEO. But if it's a smaller company you're working with that maybe doesn't have their own Director of Marketing, then you kind of want to take on that role and provide a variety of services. It's kind of a business-dependent approach, meaning every company has different needs - no two are the same. Although productizing the services for clarity, ease of pitching is a good idea too.

In response to your question, I would agree with you that it is a difficult situation - writing content for a law firm that you don't have the technical chops for. Assuming that you're dealing with lawyers - I would imagine they are super busy and their billable hourly rate is so high that they're incentivized to work on their own client work rather than help you write content.

Perhaps rather than a blog, you can organize and repackage lawyer-approved information and helpful guides to post on their site. Think about who their clients are and what the clients need help with and serve them the best info possible on the site. Showcase the trust and authority of the firm with evergreen content.

If you do decide to continue blogging, perhaps take the Movado approach - where in their real estate niche instead of talking about real estate jargon and industry issues, they broaden out to talk about cities, neighborhoods, and local topics in cities across the world.

Thanks for the transparency as usual. A question I've always been wondering:

Moz seems to have much more stature, clout, and maybe funding compared to many other SEO software companies based around the world. And of course you offer more of a suite of products rather than just focusing on Open Site Explorer. But to me one of the most important SEO tools is the backlink explorer tools that companies offer, and it seems like OSE, although one of the first, lags compared to a few others. I've read that OSE isn't looking to just grab all the links, but only the most important ones. It seems though that there's been lots of technical challenges, and I can't help but think that there are other companies that have already solved their indexing challenges or are a few steps ahead of OSE.

Would Moz ever go out an buy a pretty good backlink explorer company like Ahrefs or Majestic or some other upstart that's solved that piece of the puzzle? Combining that new technology that's solved the indexing part with your DA algorithm seems like a match made in heaven. I'm sure you guys have considered this years ago internally, but it's a question I've always pondered...

@Trevor - I've noticed an anecdotal trend since around 2011/2012 as the average thumbs up on any Moz post has decreased. Seems that after the switch from SEOmoz to Moz there was a dip, and then a second dip after this most recent redesign. Am I totally off here, or is this something you guys are seeing.

Would be a cool blog post to compare the trends of page views and thumbs up over time and any big meta trends that go along with that, could be very informative. I'm sure there's some UX and brand engagement metrics to go along with that.

Have also noticed less comments from well known SEO/other leaders since around that time. Could very well be a correlation between those who were leaders in 2012 that have since just received so much business that they can't keep up with commenting and/or they've shifted attention to their own websites and content. I'm thinking of people like Wil Reynolds, Ross Hudgens, Dan Shure, even Cyrus Shepard and Dr. Pete, among others!

Again, would make an excellent blog post!

Hey Matt,

I'm not sure without researching if Blogspot has this, but one thing you might want to consider is a cross-domain canonical tag. Dr Pete has done a few great posts on the different was to use rel="canonical" that might apply in your situation. See http://moz.com/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks and http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Hope that gets you started!

Forgive me if this is already listed somewhere else - but why isn't Moz optimized for mobile? I imagine you guys are working on it but there might be huge technical obstacles?

Great response Ryan, thanks! Plugins updated, disavow and closing backdoor is next!

I have no idea why or what their mistake/intent would be, but my mom's artist website (kathleenmrobison.com) has been link/anchor text spammed for NFL jerseys - so weird.

As seen in SEMrush, her site is actually ranking for some of these keywords - but we don't want/need these at all.

Do we proactively disavow all of these sites in with the disavow file, or just ignore until we get problems with warnings?

**Edit: **I also see that some fake URLs have been created, so it is definitely a spam/hacked issue.

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I second what Ray says, having the rule in your .htaccess file is always a good practice. Especially to prevent the annoyance of seeing both versions in your Google Analytics.

This question was answered in another Moz Q&A, and although it's from 2012 the responses are still good.

That second column titled LRD's means "Linking Root Domains" so from what I can see from your screenshot, you have 0 external links to each of those pages. I'm not sure off the top of my head but I think if you click that 'Export CSV' button in the top right it gives you much more information including internal links. If that one doesn't, then exporting a Moz crawl report will give you what you need.

In general, if your 404 pages are gone and are not of much use, it's ok to let them 404. See the Not Found section of this post http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools and read the two other links in that section for more info.

It's definitely a tricky question to answer, and there are a few ways of going about it.

I'm a big fan of Page One Power and they do charge by hour blocks, which you've mentioned. The reason Jon Ball says they do this is because every site is different and they can't charge by the link because of that. A link is not a link.

On the flip side:

• One of the most well known internet marketing firms that employees high profile SEO speakers charges $500 per link.
• A UK link building agency that is medium-well known was charging around $125 a link in 2012
• A large multi-media agency based in California I know of was charging $750 a link on old domains in deep pages for their clients

In my opinion the most transparent way all around is to do it in the hour-block method that Page One Power does it because all links are not created equal. In this method the link builder should report to the client at the end of the month how efficiently they spent the clients money in the 20 hours dedicated to link building that month. This method could cause initial strain in the client-consultant relationship however because the client might look at the consultant's rate (say it's $100 an hour) and compare them to other consultants.

Another method is to charge by the link. The problem with this is all links are not created equal. The consultant is not incentivized in the short term to spend 5 hours to earn one extremely valuable link if they're not going to be paid any more than if they spent one hour building that link.

A hybrid method could be to charge the client based on where the link was placed, but evaluating the price of each placed link every month is a lot of work and a lot of discussion.

In 2014, creating super high quality content should be talked about in the same sentence as building links since they go hand in hand. So that brings us to another method, where a block of say 20 hours a month for a small-medium business is set aside to spend on content and links. Some months 70% of that 20 hours is spent on building that content piece, but then for the next 2 months 70% of the time is spend promoting that content piece. This is how I would prefer to work, and it's a win-win both ways. The SEO consultant is both incentivized to create good content and promote it at the same time. The client is ensured that their money is being spent wisely and for the right reason.

I like talking about prices, it's something we need more guidance on in this industry.

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I agree with EGOL's answer - right on.

I was trained in theory in my early days that you should NEVER have two pages targeting the same keyword, similar to Ryan's first answer about Google getting "confused" about both pages and ranking neither. I've now seen in practice over the years that this isn't true and that double listings from the 1&2 or even 2-4 positions are very possible, especially for "chunky middle" and long-tail terms.

Similar to how Rand and many others have been saying over the years, you do want to create the perfectly optimized page for your main keywords, fully of great content, rich media, focused CTA's, etc. But there is also a natural use of certain keywords throughout your site that occurs. There are similar but not exact pages that just happen to target the same keywords - and these often create the double listings. So following the advice from others above, what I've seen work well for double listings is to choose a primary keyword for each of your main pages, but don't worry about overlapping certain keywords among your pages - this happens naturally and you can get double listings as a result.