Spam pages / content created due to hack. 404 cleanup.
-
A hosting company's server was hacked and one of our customer's sites was injected with 7,000+ pages of fake, bogus, promotional content.
Server was patched and spammy content removed from the server.
Reviewing Google Webmaster's Tools we have all the hacked pages showing up as 404's and have a severe drop in impressions, rank and traffic. GWT also has 'Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links'...
What do you recommend for:
- Cleaning up 404's to spammy pages? (I am not sure redirect to home page is a right thing to do - is it?)
- Cleaning up links that were created off site to the spam pages
- Getting rank bank // what would you do in addition to the above?
-
You want those old spam pages to have a 410 code - gone (permanently). I'm not 100% sure how you will achieve this though... I'd speak to your hosting company and/or web developer.
404 code means the page is 'not found' which isn't the same as 410, which tells the search engines that the page has gone forever, so they won't keep looking for it.
Hope this helps!
Amelia
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
-
404 Hurricane Update Page After?
Hi All, I am wondering if anyone could help me decide how I should go about handling a page i plan on removing and could possibly use later on. So, a perfect example is: Let's say a company in Florida posted a page about the stores hours and possibly closing due to the incoming hurricane. Once the hurricane passes and the store is reopened, should I 404 that page since another hurricane could come after? The url for the company is www.company.com/hurricane so this is a url that we would want to use again. I guess we could just 410 and name each url www.company.com/hurricane-irma & www.company.com/hurricane-jose for each new hurricane. I am just wonder what is the best practice for a situation like this. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | aua0 -
Email and landing page duplicate content issue?
Hi Mozers, my question is, if there is a web based email that goes to subscribers, then if they click on a link it lands on a Wordpress page with very similar content, will Google penalize us for duplicate content? If so is the best workaround to make the email no index no follow? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane770 -
404 from a 404 that 301s
I must be missing something or skipping a step or lacking proper levels of caffeine. Under my High Priority warnings I have a handful of 404s which are like that on purpose but I'm not sure how Moz is finding them. When I check the referrer info, the 404 is being linked to from a different 404 which is now a 301 (due to craziness of our system and what was easiest for the coders to fix a different problem ages ago). Basically, if a user decides to type in a non-existent model number into the URL there is a specific 404 that comes up. While the 404 error is "site.com/product/?model=abc123" the referrer is "site.com/product?model=abc123" (or more simply, one slash is missing). I can't see how Moz is finding the referrer so I can't figure out how to make Moz stop crawling it. I actually have the same problem in Google WMT for the same group of 404s. What am I just not seeing that will fix this?
Technical SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
Pages appear fine in browser but 404 error when crawled?
I am working on an eCommerce website that has been written in WordPress with the shop pages in E commerce Plus PHP v6.2.7. All the shop product pages appear to work fine in a browser but 404 errors are returned when the pages are crawled. WMT also returns a 404 error when ‘fetch as Google’ is used. Here is a typical page: http://www.flyingjacket.com/proddetail.php?prod=Hepburn-Jacket Why is this page returning a 404 error when crawled? Please help?
Technical SEO | | Web-Incite0 -
Duplicate content /index.php/ issues
I'm having some duplicate content issues with Google. I've already got my .htaccess file working just fine as far as I can tell. Rewriting works great, and by using the site you'd never end up on a page with /index.php. However I do notice that on ANY page of the site you could add /index.php and get the same page i.e.: www.mysite.com/category/article and www.mysite.com/index.php/category/article Would both return the same page. How can I 301 or something similar all /index.php pages to the non index.php version? I have no desire for any page on my site to have index.php in it, there is no use to it. Having quite the hard time figuring this out. Again this is basically just for the robots, the URL's the users see are perfect, never had an issue with that. Just SEOMOZ reporting duplicate content and I've verified that to be true.
Technical SEO | | b18turboef1 -
Pages with content defined by querystring
I have a page that show traveltips: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips-liste This page shows all traveltips for Alcudia. Each traveltip also has its own url: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips?TravelTipsId=19767 ( 2 weeks ago i noticed the url http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips show up in google webmaster tools as a 404 page, along with 100 of others urls to the subpage /rejsemalstips WITHOUT a querystring. With no querystring there is no content on the page and it goes 404. I need my technicians to redirect that page so it shows the list, but in the meantime i would like to block it in robots.txt But how do i block a page if it is called without a querystring?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
How do I deal with my pages being seen as duplicate content by SeoMoz?
My Dashboard is giving my lots of warnings for duplicate content but it all seems to have something to do with the www and the slash / For example: http://www.ebow.ie/ is seen as having the same duplicate content as http:/ebow.ie/ and http://www.ebow.ie Alos lots to do with how Wordpress categorizes pages and tags that is driving me bonkers! Any help appreciated! Dave. seomoz.png
Technical SEO | | ebowdublin0 -
404 page for webshop vs 302 redirect
Hi everybody Im the owner of a webshop and we have implemented that products that are not instock are disabled from the shop. My problem is that i have a lot of 404 pages, that right now get redirected to the front page, when the item are not instock. This is because it would hurt the conversion rate if they got a standard 404 page. Customers dont know what a 404 and would click back and choose another competitor. Its really hard to find out what are the best solution and what are not a downrank at google. This has been running like this for 2 years and cant see any negative in the solution regarding seo and so on, What are your thoughts? Christian Hansen Denmark
Technical SEO | | noerdar0