We have a site hosted on SquareSpace:  Roomhance.com

Going through the on-page optimizaton tool, we noticed that the H1 tags weren't fully optimized.

If you click on view source on the page, it shows 2 H1 tags on the home page:

id="logoImage"><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="</a>/">src="//static1.squarespace.com/static/5bcca055ab1a62465f5b9ee7/t/5c18feb270a6adf771765799/1588613682225/?format=1500w" alt="Virtual Staging For Real Estate | Roomhance" />

style="text-align:center;white-space:pre-wrap;">Virtual Staging

The 2nd one shown above it the H1 tag we want.  I'm wondering if the H1 tag in the logo image is hurting us for SEO?  Can't figure out how to modify it in SquareSpace.

Martijn -

Thanks for your reply.  I tried the code you provided, however it still provided a 404 error.   I was able to get the following to work properly - any drawbacks to doing it this way?

RewriteRule ^mono(.*)$ - [NC,R=410,L]

The browser now shows the following anytime there is the word "mono" immediately after "sitename.com/"

The requested resource
/mono.php
is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.

Additionally, a 410 Gone error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Thanks for the detailed response.  Yes, there are some negative-SEO backlinks to some of the URLs created during the spam injection.  I've seen a few backlinks from other forum sites to our site to one of the spam created URLs which has hurt our rankings such as the following URL created on our site:

sitename.com/mono.php?best-resume-writing-service-for-it-professionals

I was confused by the following in your response:  "If you can serve the 410s on a custom 410 page which also gives the Meta no-index directive, that will be a very strong signal to Google indeed that those aren't proper pages or fit for indexation"

• Is that all done view the htaccess file?  Code? Or is the meta no-index directive done in the robots.txt?- custom 410 page?  I've seen some 404 pages, but not custom 410 pages.  Would that be similar to a new 404 page?

Thanks for your response.

We had a spam injection a few months ago.  We successfully cleaned up the site and resubmitted to google.  I recently received a notification showing a spike in 404 errors.

All of the URLS have a common word at the beginning injected via the spam:

sitename.com/mono
sitename.com/mono.php?buy-good-essays
sitename.com/mono.php?professional-paper-writer

There's about 100 total URLS with the same syntax with the word "mono" in them.  Based on my research, it seems that it would be best to serve a 410.  I wanted to know what the line of HTACCESS code would be to do that in bulk for any URL that has the word "mono" after the sitename.com/

i'm first going to see what happens if I just upload a sitemap with http URLs since there wasn't a sitemap in webmaster tools from before.  Will give you the update then.

Paul that does make sense - i'll add the SSL certificate back, and then redirect from https to http via the htaccess file.

GR - thanks for the response.

Given our site is just 65 pages, would it make sense to just put all of the site's "https" URLs in the robots.txt file as "noindex" now rather than waiting for all the pages to get indexed as "https" and then remove them?

And then upload a sitemap to webmaster tools with the URLS as "http://"?

VW

We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized.  As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site.  However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet.  So, those iframes weren't displaying the content.

As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for.

However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors.  The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https.  I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https.

My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?