Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
-
Hi,
I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers.
This is how they do it:
1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS.
2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites.
3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name.
4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites.
What I have done currently:
1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts.
2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week.
Problem now is:
When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google.
Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google.
Question:
1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this?
2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow?
3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues?
Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword
-
I'm afraid there's no easy answer. The security side is beyond the scope of Q&A (it's just too dependent on your platform/host/etc.), but locking that down is definitely the biggest and first step. Obviously, though, you can't stop third-party sites from getting hacked.
Disavow can be done at the domain level. There are some oddities, like Wordpress.com (where sub-domains act more like stand-alone domains), but for most sites, if most links are malicious, lock down the entire incoming domain.
Make sure your core links are clean. If you have a solid base of links, and you're not dealing with a lot of quality issues, it's tough for these kinds of hacked links to cause as much harm. Google knows this happens. Unfortunately, if your core link profile is a mess or week, then it's a lot easier to take damage. So, this is a battle on two fronts - stop the attack and, at the same time, clean up your core link profile and strengthen it as best you can.
There are a lot of link removal tools now, but honestly, they're a starting point. You need to dig in and evaluate what they give you, so that you're not taking out links that are potentially good. Right now, this is a labor-intensive process, I'm afraid.
-
Hi Andy,
Am currently gathering data from Webmaster Tools.
No, I didn't get any manual actions message from Google.
I do have a list. Am trying to use Kerboo (LinkRisk) to manage it. However, I have little time to do this.
-
Hi,
2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow?
Yes, I would be disavowing at a domain level (not even subdomain) with a view to blocking everything you find.
How have you been gathering link data? Webmaster Tools? Ahrefs? Majestic? OSE?
Ideally you need to create one master list of everything you can find and start from there. It isn't going to be a quick fix though because if you have been caught by Penguin, you wont get out of any penalty until it is re-run again. All you can do is prepare for when that run happens.
If you haven't yet been caught by Penguin, then you would be saving yourself a lot of worry by getting this resolved before the next refresh happens.
-Andy
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
-
Confused on footer links (Which are best practices for footer links on other websites?)
Hello folks, We are eCommerce web design and Development Company and we give do follow links of our website to every projects which we have done with specific keywords. So now the concern is we are seeing huge amount of back-links are being generated from single root domain for particular keyword in webmaster tools. So what should be the best way to practice this? Should we give no follow attribute to it or can use our company logo with link? LtMjHER.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Page for Link Building
Hello Guys, My question is about a link building process. We all know that some directories/sites do require a reciprocal link. Does it make any sense to creat a page in website exclusively to reciprocal links? And what we do with this webpage in terms of indexing, do folow, crawling...etc. Any sugestions are more then welcome 🙂 Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
More than one web domain
Hi What is best when considering using more than one domain on a website, what the best policy ? it's a question I get asked a lot, usually because prior to any seo efforts the main domain name purchased is not keyword rich or an abbreviated company name etc. what impact do new domains have on SEO compared to older existing domains- is it worth changing a generic company named domain for a keyword rich domain? if having multiple domains pointing to the site is beneficial how best is it to configure? How do i inform Google? How do both domains get index when there is only one physical site? How should i monitor it, Analytic s, SEO moz? Will the domain compete against each other and effect SEO rank? Are they best used for marketing purposes on external sites, adverts driving traffic to the main site. I'm aware there are lots of questions above, any answers/ opinions , links to further info would be greatly appreciated. cheers
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Domains
My questions is what to do with old domains we own from a past business. Is it advantages to direct them to the new domain/company or is that going to cause a problem for the new company. They are not in the same industry.
Technical SEO | | KeylimeSocial0 -
301 for old domain to new domain - Joomla plugin or cpanel?
A client changed domains and both are being indexed. There are thousands of content pages. I can install a 301 redirect Joomla plugin and configure it so that each page redirects to the new domain. I have a feeling I will need to manual set every page. OR I can create a domain level redirect setting in cpanel using wildcards. I think this will automatically pass every old URL to the new URL. Which is the better approach? The cpanel option sounds like less work.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
301 redirect domain to page on another domain
Hi, If I wanted to do a 301 permanent redirect on a domain to a page on another domain will this cause any problems? Lets say I have 4 domains (all indexed with content), I decide to create a new domain with 4 pages, one for each domain. I copy the content from the old domains to the relevant page on the new domain and set it live. At the same time as setting the new site live I do a 301 permanent redirect on the 4 domains to the relevant pages on the new domain. What happens if Google indexes the new site before visiting the redirected domains, could this cause a duplicate content penalty? Cheers
Technical SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0