How to de-index a page with a search string with the structure domain.com/?"spam"
-
The site in question was hacked years ago. All the security scans come up clean but the seo crawlers like semrush and ahrefs still show it as an indexed page. I can even click through on it and it takes me to the homepage with no 301. Where is the page and how to deindex it?
domain/com/?spam
There are multiple instances of this.
http://www.clipular.com/c/5579083284217856.png?k=Q173VG9pkRrxBl0b5prNqIozPZI
-
You are most welcome. I'm glad to hear your road to site recovery is coming along. I'm also glad to confirm that, to all of my knowledge, your understanding of the "*" operator and Disallow /?spam string is correct. One more thing:
Fetch as Google and Request Indexing
Apologies, I neglected to mention this step in my answer. It should be included. This is the best tool I'm aware of to ask Google, "hey, crawl me please." Do this after you upload your shiny new robots.txt.In GSC, under Crawl, select Fetch as Google. Then, select Fetch and Render. When status is partial or complete, click Request Indexing. There is no guarantee here, and my experience is Google does what it wants. Even so, I've seen results in less than 2 hours (full disclosure: the longest I've waited has been 3 days).
Penalty Free I agree. They cannot possibly be penalizing your site. At least, not purposefully. You have taken all recommended actions and then some to resolve site issues. Even if you do have a few bad back links floating around out there from some blackhat t3 site PBN, Penguin 4.0 should discredit that bad link juice. Your site doesn't even have the offending pages. It's just a matter of time before Google's index lines back up with your live site.
Good Work Sir,
Wipe the Index Clean,
CopyChrisSEO and the Vizergy Team -
Thanks very much for your explanation.
I have gone ahead and temporarily blocked the pages in GSC.
I am working on the robot.txt and see there are no instructions for the crawlers to skip over these urls in question.
I understand that I should use the "*" operator to alert all crawlers to disallow the pages in this format:
user-agent: *
Disallow: /?spam string
Finally, I will send the suggested edit to Google and see where that gets me. Honestly, at this point, they cannot possibly be penalized the site any worse so anything working towards cleaning up the index for the site will be a step in the right direction.
-
Hello Miamirealestatetrendsguy and fellow Mozers,
It sounds like you have had a crazy time handling this hack. Good news is, as far as I can tell from the given information, you are close to resolution. Googlebot should correct the indexed pages over time. I'm certain you would like to expedite that process. Here are three recommendations that come to mind: Remove URLs via GSC, block the offending URLs via robots.txt, and suggest edits in Google's SERPs.
Remove URLs via GSC
In GSC, under Google Index, select Remove URLs. This suppression is temporary however. Click on more information for more about that. My experience with it as been suppression for a few months. Don't worry about the time though. Our next step should take affect before your time is up.Block the Offending URLs via Robots.txt
Before you do this, be very certain what you are doing. After you are confident, list your offending URLs, edit the offending URLs as noindex nofollow in your robots.txt, and upload it. Hopefully, you can find commonalities to shorten this list and save your time.Note: I have purposefully avoided the details on how to this here because it is vital SEOs learn how to do it with full knowledge of potential risks as well as how to avoid those risks. Here are some resources:
• Google Support • Moz's Robots.txt Rundown
• Search Engine Land's Deeper LookSuggest Edits in Google's SERPs This one is iffy, and I really don't trust Google using this feedback. However, I have done it and it worked more than once. Find your offending results and send specific feedback.
Wipe that Index Clean,
CopyChrisSEO and the Vizergy Team
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
-
"nofollow" vs. "no follow"
Does anyone know if it is problematic to have a space between the "no" and the "follow"? I just discovered our CMS has been inserting a space and am trying to understand if it the reason why something that we were trying to keep from being indexed has become indexed.
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?
This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files." Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post." Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down. My question is two parts: 1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed? 2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script? 3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page? Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Help with pages Google is labeling "Not Followed"
I am seeing a number of pages that I am doing 301 redirects on coming up under the "Not Followed" category of the advanced index status in google webmasters. Google says this might be because the page is still showing active content or the redirect is not correct. I don't know how to tell if the page is still showing active content, and if someone can please tell me how to determine this it would be greatly appreciated. Also if you can provide a solution for how to adjust my page to make sure that the content is not appearing to be active, that would be amazing. Thanks in advance, here is a few links to pages that are experiencing this: www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/sunnyisles.html www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/summerield.html
Technical SEO | | Jdubin0 -
Getting More Pages Indexed
We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png
Technical SEO | | Mattchstick0 -
Having both <title>and <meta name="title"...> on a web page?</title>
Hi All, Client of mine using reversed Meta Tags format in their website and Honestly i never saw such Meta Tags formats. In my opinion having 2 Title tags and wrong reversed description tag is not correct and the needs to be removed, and other tags need to be changed,too But they said that it probably doesn't make a difference because weird thing is Search Engines are apparently able to index them ,So they don't think it affects search engine results and won't remove it just based on opinion. So should i persist in correcting them or just hope for the best and ignore it?!?!?! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Http:// vs http://www.
Why is it that when I run an "On Page Optimization Keyword Report" for my website I get a different score when using http://www.tandmkitchens.com vs http://tandmkitchens.com. My keyword is "Kitchen Remodeling" http://www.tandmkitchens.com scores an A http://tandmkitchens.com scores a B It's the same page yet one url scores higher than the other. Any help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Gary0 -
URL Structure "-" vs "/"? Are there any advantages to one over the other?
An example would be domain.com/keyword/keyword2 vs domain.com/keyword-keyword2 Are there any advantages / disadvantages to one over the other?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0