Alrogthimc penalty due to pharma hack that created drug links to home page. What to do?
-
Our site: Starcitylimo.com got destroyed by a pharma styled hack to their wordpress site. After having to re build the site from scratch to remove the virus, it was found that hundreds or even thousands of pharma links from overseas sites point to his home page (so we can't just 404 the pages).
Contacting the sites for removal does nothing. Added to dissavow 4 months ago did nothing. He's page 5 for every keyword he was position 5 or better for.
Is this one of those situations where its time to move on to a new domain?
-
No problem, it looks like you have a pretty involved project ahead of you. I would do a page level audit in GWT, Majestic and aHrefs. Be very careful which pages you 301.
If you want to be surgical - you can try getting good links changed to the new domain. That will be incredibly time consuming.
Regarding GWT reporting, I had a client that bought a link farm and did a blanket redirect... right smack into their root domain. Ouch. Luckily they had administrative control of said link farm - when the sitewide footer links were removed - it took about a month for GWT to remove them from link reports. Mileage may vary. Part of it depends on Google knowing it's not there - at least for the purposes of GWT reporting.
They had about 2,000,000+ backlinks. A lot of them were sitewides, another portion was article spam and blog spam. Some of it was just scraped. I wanted to remove at least 500,000 (just to be cautious) they only allowed 30K. But I got the link farm out of there. The site stabilized - but it was clear they needed to remove more. Such is life.
It would have been a great recovery story.
-
Thanks Travis, wow well I had never heard that about WMT. After reading countless link removal, penalty removal, SEO articles on moz and around the web I've never heard the download Google gives you isn't sufficient. I know it lags way behind others, but wow thats news people need to know.
It sounds like its time to move the site and move the good links we have with it then. More time is definitely not an option and with the majority being foreign spam, I don't believe we can control the link removal process successfully.
Thanks Again!
-
GWT definitely doesn't show you the whole picture. Majestic SEO won't show you the whole picture. Ahrefs or OSE can't show you the whole picture either.
Google has a pretty good idea of your link inventory. They share very little. In my understanding, the spreadsheet you download is just what they've shown you until it's no longer there.
No one set of link data is ever 100%. It's a big internet, but the one source that appears to generally share the least amount of data is Google. That's why you should use multiple sets of link data and do some spreadsheet wizardry to sort out the duplicates.
The general consensus regarding how long it takes to get a link penalty lifted is; "It takes as long as it takes." Some have taken up to a year and a few turned around fairly fast. Four months isn't exactly irregular.
Majestic is showing a lot of deleted links, so there's definitely some progress there. It's just hard to see the wheat from the chaff at a glance. Yeah, the backlink profile was hit hard.
Regarding the 404s... letting them 404 is just wasting crawl budget. It may be a good idea to 410 those and let the bots know those pages aren't there. In regard to what pages were dropped, you might have lost some pretty good links. I haven't done a page level audit, but losing good links with a ton of bad can delay the process as well.
Someone is going to chime in about the 'foundation' of links, and they would be correct. It's a whole other screed - so I'll leave it to them. Seriously, this one looks pretty nasty. Best of luck.
-
Hello Rob, as I mentioned hundreds of these links point to his home page. I have already changed the URL's and content on the other pages and let them 404.
If you search wordpress Pharma hack you can read all about it. But needless to say we fixed the hack, the problem is just the inbound links and the nasty algorithmic penalty that he has. The notice we got from Google that the site was compromised was removed 4 weeks ago, and rankings went from beyond page 10 to mostly page 5-6.
-
GTW backlinks is only 10% of Majestic? I've never seen this data before, and that would make zero sense if Google employees penalties on websites for links but does not provide the list of all the external links they find. I know the summary is all thats provided in GTW but the download is supposed to all inclusive, or so I have been lead to understand...
Either way, these links are IMPOSSIBLE to remove. So if Google webmaster Disavow doesn't actually work at removing penalties (algorithimic in nature) what then can we do?
-
Majestic SEO is still crawling thousands of 'new' bad links. I can't really say what Google bot is doing. I also don't know what domains you've disavowed.
The good news is, Majestic shows that it appears to be at least ebbing. I would revisit GWT backlinks and look for anything new. Know that you're barely getting 10% of the picture, if that.
I would hate to give up on a domain that's ten years old, but it looks like there's a little more history to understand. Plug it into SEM rush and slide the scale back to 'all time'.
-
Where are the links embedded? On the actual pages of your site (internal)? On the homepage? In the back-end of Wordpress (as you said it was a virus)??? Provide a little more detail and we may be able to find the right solution. Each of which would be different based on the various types of links going out to his site.
Thanks, Rob
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 are best page titles for sub-domain pages?
Hi Moz communtity, Let's say a website has multiple sub-domains with hundreds and thousands of pages. Generally we will be mentioning "primary keyword & "brand name" on every page of website. Can we do same on all pages of sub-domains to increase the authority of website for this primary keyword in Google? Or it gonna end up as negative impact if Google consider as duplicate content being mentioned same keyword and brand name on every page even on website and all pages of sub domains? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
Change domain whilst under a partial manual links penalty
Hi there We're currently under a manual penalty for some unnatural links to our domain and have been working on fixing that but had our first re-consideration request rejected so we're doing a second round of link removals The issue we have is that we were planning to change our domain before the SSL certificate expires in a couple of weeks and renew the certificate with the new domain but are unsure whether to stop working on the reconsideration request, change the domain and wait until the manual penalty moves to the new domain before continuing the link removal. Alternatively try and use the domain change to select which links are 301'd to the new site and leave behind the bad links in the hope that the manual penalty wouldn't be applied to the new domain Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
If I only Link to Page via Sitemap, can it still get indexed?
Hi there! I am creating a ton of content for specific geographies. Is it possible for these pages to get indexed if I only put them in my sitemap and don't link to them through my actual site (though the pages will be live). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Travis0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Is it a bad idea to have a "press" page and link to press mentions of our company?
We've recently been getting quite a bit of press. Would it be wise to create a "press" page and link to mentions of us or would this devalue the links on the press pages as Google may think they reciprocal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JenniferDacosta0 -
100 + links on a scrolling page
Can you add more than 100 links on your webpage If you have a webpage that adds more content from a database as a visitor scrolls down the page. If you look at the page source the 100 + links do not show up, only the first 20 links. As you scroll down it adds more content and links to the bottom of the page so its a continuos flowing page if you keep scrolling down. Just wanted to know how the 100 links maximum fits into this scenario ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
To many on page links with ABC search
My client site http://www.tshirtsubway.com has a ABC quick find selector on the homepage of the site and throughout the site and as a result is is showing an error of to many links on the SEO moz error crawls reports. I wanted some advice on improving this and perhaps looking for an alternative also looking at the current setup and asking is this wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0