Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Malicious site pointed A-Record to my IP, Google Indexed
-
Hello All,
I launched my site on May 1 and as it turns out, another domain was pointing it's A-Record to my IP. This site is coming up as malicious, but worst of all, it's ranking on keywords for my business objectives with my content and metadata, therefore I'm losing traffic.
I've had the domain host remove the incorrect A-Record and I've submitted numerous malware reports to Google, and attempted to request removal of this site from the index. I've resubmitted my sitemap, but it seems as though this offending domain is still being indexed more thoroughly than my legitimate domain.
Can anyone offer any advice? Anything would be greatly appreciated!
Best regards,
Doug
-
Yes, sorry, Fetch as Google: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158587
-
Thanks Cyrus. Do you mean Fetch as Google? I'm not too familiar with that specific tool.
Just in case someone runs into the same issue that I've encountered, I'll include my final steps in remedying this problem (hopefully).
I was finally able to contact the webmaster of the other domain who agreed to take down the site. I contacted GoDaddy to confirm her site was down, since I wasn't risking getting my machine infected with malware. Next I went to Webmaster Tools and requested content removal, page by page until all of the bad URLs were submitted.
In my frustration and possibly paranoia, I've also had to battle with GoDaddy to get a new dedicated IP address since I believe this IP could now be "tainted" or flagged as a malicious or spammy.
Cyrus, you couldn't be more accurate. Extremely tough to wait out. Hopefully this will help someone out down the road.
Thanks again.
-
Hi Edward,
You might have already done this, but:
1. Crawl as Googlebot to your homepage - submit all pages and all linked pages to index.
2. You said you submitted your sitemap. Submit it again.
3. Hopefully this will resolve in a couple weeks. Tough to wait it out.
-
Nope, it doesn't. I guess it's just a waiting game at this point. Thank you again.
-
Does it still resolve to your site? If not, it should fall off as Google spiders it again.
-
Thank you! This will prevent future issues, but in terms of the other domain pulling rank on mine, is that something I need to wait out since I have no control? Is there any way to have it removed?
-
Your htaccess file can do the 301 (it's actually a config file you can control). Here's some sample code that should do the trick.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
Thanks for your reply! It's hosted with GoDaddy on their Economy package. I believe it's shared hosting.
With that being said, unfortunately I don't have access to the server config. How would I go about implementing a 301 redirect for the other domain or even better a 404?
I absolutely agree about modifying the htaccess. As it stands now, I've hacked it together, but I'll see if I can find out how to do what you're suggesting.
I appreciate your feedback so far.
Best regards
-
That sounds like a bad web server config. Most servers run a virtual host, meaning the URL determines what website is served up. Either you have your own virtual dedicated server and only one site that isn't using vhost, or your host has set your website up as the default site.
If you have control over the web server config, I would add the malicious site to the config as a hosted site and then have it return a 404. That should de-index it.
If you don't have that level of control, try to get a 301 redirect for the bad domain. You really need something like an htaccess that says if a site is accessing my website as anything but www.mydomain.com it needs to 301 to that URL. Otherwise anyone in the world can hijack your site the way it's set up now. Just point another A record and instant duplicate content headaches.
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
-
Staging website got indexed by google
Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta0 -
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Can you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
How can I find all broken links pointing to my site?
I help manage a large website with over 20M backlinks and I want to find all of the broken ones. What would be the most efficient way to go about this besides exporting and checking each backlink's reponse code? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevenLevine3 -
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0