Using 410 To Remove URLs Starting With Same Word
-
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-writerThere'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/
-
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.
-
There are so many ways to deal with this. If these were indeed spam URLs, someone may have attached negative-SEO links to them (to water down your site's ranking power). As such, redirecting these URLs back to their parents could pull spam metrics 'onto' your site which would be really bad. I can see why you are thinking about using 410 (gone)
Using Canonical tags to stop Google from indexing those bad parameter-based URLs could also be helpful. If you 'canonicalled' those addresses to their non-parameter based parents, Google would stop crawling those pages. When a URL 'canonicals' to another, different page - it cites itself as non-canonical, and thus gets de-indexed (usually, although this is only a directive). Again though, canonical tags interrelate pages. If those spam URLs were backed by negative SEO attacks, the usage of canonical tags would (again) be highly inadvisable (leaving your 410 suggestion as a better method).
Google listens for wildcard rules in your robots.txt file, though it runs very simplified regex (in fact I think only the "*" wildcard is supported). In your robots.txt you could do something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mono.php?*That would cull Google's crawling of most of those URLs, but not necessarily the indexation. This would be something to do after Google has swallowed most of the 410s and 'got the message'. You shouldn't start out with this, as if Google can't crawl those URLs - it won't see your 410s! Just remember this, so that when the issue is resolved you can smack this down and stop the attack from occurring again (or at least, it will be preemptively nullified)
Finally you have Meta "No-Index" tags. They don't stop Google from crawling a URL, but they will remove those URLs from Google's index. 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
So now we have a bit of an action plan:
- 410 the bad URLs alongside a Meta no-index directive served from the same URL
- Once Google has swallowed all that (may be some weeks or just over 1 month), back-plate it with robots.txt wildcards
With regards to your oriignal question (sorry I took so long to get here) I'd use something like:
Redirect 410 /mono.php?*
I think .htaccess swallows proper regex (I think). The back slashes say "whatever character follows me, treat that character as a value and do not apply its general regex function". It's the regex escape character (usually). This would go in the .htaccess file at the root of your site, not in a subdir .htaccess file
Please sandbox text my recommendation first. I'm really more of a technical data analyst than a developer!
This document seems to suggest that a .htaccess file will properly swallow "" as the escape character:
https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/htaccess-redirects-with-special-characters
Hope this helps!
-
Hi,
Have you also excluded these pages from the robots.txt file so you can make sure that they're also not being crawled?
The code for the redirect looks something like this:RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/mono* - [G,NC]Martijn.
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
-
URL Format
Often we have web platforms that have a default URL structure that looks something like this www.widgetcompany.co.uk/widget-gallery/coloured-widgets/red-widgets This format is quite well structured but would it just be more effective to be www.widgetcompany.co.uk/red-widgets? I realise that it may depend on a lot of factors but generally is it better to have the shorter URL if targeting the key phrase "red widgets" One thing, it certainly looks a bit keyword stuffy with all those "widgets"
Technical SEO | | vital_hike0 -
URL Understanding -
Hello everyone! Can anyone help me understanding this url? Product.asp?PID=1236 cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Home page URL
Hi, I work on this site: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/about-us. This is the home page URL. Should this be 301'd to: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk? I have created a site map, which I submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, which includes these URL's: /about-us, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. There are a total of 3 pages on the website. Webmaster tools has only indexed 2 out of 3 pages. I think this is something to do with the /about-us URL, as when I do a site: search, these pages appear: www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. I am not sure why Google has indexed the home page as www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/ and not /about-us? Is it a bad idea in general not to have your homepage as your root domain? I added a to the homepage, but am wondering if this was the right thing to do? Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CWseo0 -
# in url affecting rank
Hi I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there. Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines? If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php be transferred to www.companyname.com/category.index.php# and affect the ranking of the non # page? I hope this makes sense! Thanks
Technical SEO | | sicseo0 -
Block or remove pages using a robots.txt
I want to use robots.txt to prevent googlebot access the specific folder on the server, Please tell me if the syntax below is correct User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /folder/ I want to use robots.txt to prevent google image index the images of my website , Please tell me if the syntax below is correct User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
Technical SEO | | semer0 -
3 URLS Being Created All For The Same Page
I use wordpress for my blog and for some reason it is creating triple urls for my pages. I am not sure it has always been like this or not. I just noticed it in the errors section of SEO Moz. http://www.kisswedding.com/blog/?gid=7&r=20 http://www.kisswedding.com/blog/ashley-and-daniels-rainy-day-diy-farm-wedding/?gid=7&r=20 http://www.kisswedding.com/blog/ashley-and-daniels-rainy-day-diy-farm-wedding/ It's all the exact same page. Is there something I can do in my settings to make this stop. I don't imagine this is good. Ya think....ha! I saw this is the SEO Moz error area for Missing Title Tags. Apparently the number has gone from 200 to 400 which is weird because I never gave my blog posts meta stuff and I haven't written 200 pages since SEO Moz's last crawl.
Technical SEO | | annasusmiles
Maybe I changed something on my blog settings without even knowing. I can't think for the life of me what that would be though. Thanks so much and I appreciate any help received. Edited to add: I added some plugins over the past week. Maybe it's one of these? Category Text Category SEO Meta Tags (just deactivated this one) PhotoSmash (also deactivated this one) Clicky for WordPress0 -
Should we block URL param in Webmaster tools after URL migration?
Hi, We have just released a new version of our website that now has a human readable nice URL's. Our old ugly URL's are still accessible and cannot be blocked/redirected. These old URL's use a URL param that has an xpath like expression language to define the location in our catalog. We have about 2 million pages indexed with this old URL param in it while we have approximately 70k nice URL's after the migration. This high number of old URL's is due to facetting that was done using this URL param. I wonder if we should now completely block this URL param from Google Webmaster tools so that these ugly URL's will be removed from the Google index. Or will this harm our position in Google? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0 -
URLs: To Change or Not to Change
Hello, We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this: /africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania /central-south-america/galapagos-islands My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2. /central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises My questions are: Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to? This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem? Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post. 😉 Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | csmithal0