Alrogthimc penalty due to pharma hack that created drug links to home page. What to do?
-
Our site: Starcitylimo.com got destroyed by a pharma styled hack to their wordpress site. After having to re build the site from scratch to remove the virus, it was found that hundreds or even thousands of pharma links from overseas sites point to his home page (so we can't just 404 the pages).
Contacting the sites for removal does nothing. Added to dissavow 4 months ago did nothing. He's page 5 for every keyword he was position 5 or better for.
Is this one of those situations where its time to move on to a new domain?
-
No problem, it looks like you have a pretty involved project ahead of you. I would do a page level audit in GWT, Majestic and aHrefs. Be very careful which pages you 301.
If you want to be surgical - you can try getting good links changed to the new domain. That will be incredibly time consuming.
Regarding GWT reporting, I had a client that bought a link farm and did a blanket redirect... right smack into their root domain. Ouch. Luckily they had administrative control of said link farm - when the sitewide footer links were removed - it took about a month for GWT to remove them from link reports. Mileage may vary. Part of it depends on Google knowing it's not there - at least for the purposes of GWT reporting.
They had about 2,000,000+ backlinks. A lot of them were sitewides, another portion was article spam and blog spam. Some of it was just scraped. I wanted to remove at least 500,000 (just to be cautious) they only allowed 30K. But I got the link farm out of there. The site stabilized - but it was clear they needed to remove more. Such is life.
It would have been a great recovery story.
-
Thanks Travis, wow well I had never heard that about WMT. After reading countless link removal, penalty removal, SEO articles on moz and around the web I've never heard the download Google gives you isn't sufficient. I know it lags way behind others, but wow thats news people need to know.
It sounds like its time to move the site and move the good links we have with it then. More time is definitely not an option and with the majority being foreign spam, I don't believe we can control the link removal process successfully.
Thanks Again!
-
GWT definitely doesn't show you the whole picture. Majestic SEO won't show you the whole picture. Ahrefs or OSE can't show you the whole picture either.
Google has a pretty good idea of your link inventory. They share very little. In my understanding, the spreadsheet you download is just what they've shown you until it's no longer there.
No one set of link data is ever 100%. It's a big internet, but the one source that appears to generally share the least amount of data is Google. That's why you should use multiple sets of link data and do some spreadsheet wizardry to sort out the duplicates.
The general consensus regarding how long it takes to get a link penalty lifted is; "It takes as long as it takes." Some have taken up to a year and a few turned around fairly fast. Four months isn't exactly irregular.
Majestic is showing a lot of deleted links, so there's definitely some progress there. It's just hard to see the wheat from the chaff at a glance. Yeah, the backlink profile was hit hard.
Regarding the 404s... letting them 404 is just wasting crawl budget. It may be a good idea to 410 those and let the bots know those pages aren't there. In regard to what pages were dropped, you might have lost some pretty good links. I haven't done a page level audit, but losing good links with a ton of bad can delay the process as well.
Someone is going to chime in about the 'foundation' of links, and they would be correct. It's a whole other screed - so I'll leave it to them. Seriously, this one looks pretty nasty. Best of luck.
-
Hello Rob, as I mentioned hundreds of these links point to his home page. I have already changed the URL's and content on the other pages and let them 404.
If you search wordpress Pharma hack you can read all about it. But needless to say we fixed the hack, the problem is just the inbound links and the nasty algorithmic penalty that he has. The notice we got from Google that the site was compromised was removed 4 weeks ago, and rankings went from beyond page 10 to mostly page 5-6.
-
GTW backlinks is only 10% of Majestic? I've never seen this data before, and that would make zero sense if Google employees penalties on websites for links but does not provide the list of all the external links they find. I know the summary is all thats provided in GTW but the download is supposed to all inclusive, or so I have been lead to understand...
Either way, these links are IMPOSSIBLE to remove. So if Google webmaster Disavow doesn't actually work at removing penalties (algorithimic in nature) what then can we do?
-
Majestic SEO is still crawling thousands of 'new' bad links. I can't really say what Google bot is doing. I also don't know what domains you've disavowed.
The good news is, Majestic shows that it appears to be at least ebbing. I would revisit GWT backlinks and look for anything new. Know that you're barely getting 10% of the picture, if that.
I would hate to give up on a domain that's ten years old, but it looks like there's a little more history to understand. Plug it into SEM rush and slide the scale back to 'all time'.
-
Where are the links embedded? On the actual pages of your site (internal)? On the homepage? In the back-end of Wordpress (as you said it was a virus)??? Provide a little more detail and we may be able to find the right solution. Each of which would be different based on the various types of links going out to his site.
Thanks, Rob
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
-
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Does google credit links from iFrames or created by Javascript, if so, is one more powerful than the other?
Consider this example, because I want to be clear about what I mean. You have two websites. Lets all them www.a.com and www.b.com. On www.a.com/some/page, there is an iframe something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
<iframe src="www.b.com/some/special/path"></iframe>
Then content of this iframe is a bunch of pictures, text and numbers, as well as a group of links, linking each picture to www.b.com for example the links might be:
www.b.com/content/1
www.b.com/content/2
www.b.com/content/3 Questions: When google crawls **www.a.com/some/page, **does it pass link juice to www.b.com/content/*? Does google instead consider these to be internal links within b.com itself. because links to www.b.com/content/ ** are actually from b.com itself, since the domain of the iframe is actually: www.b.com/some/special/path 3) Is there any amount of link juice passed from www.a.com/some/page to* www.b.com/some/special/path **because this is the src= element of an iframe that a.com is hosting? Consider an alternative setup. Where instead of using an iframe the contents of the above described iFrame is actually added the the page dynamically using javascript, and a call to an API endpoint at b.com. Resulting in these links being added directly to the body of a.com without being wrapped in an iframe element. Questions:
4) Do these links that were created after page load still get crawled and credited by google? (i have heard in the past that google was going to start crawling javascript, i just don't know if this is known for a fact yet).
5) Do links created on the client side hold the same weight as a link that was served directly via the backend html generation? If both the links within the iframe and the links within the javascript embed method pass link juice. Is one preferred over the other? is one known to be more effective than the other? Thanks!0 -
Do I eventually 301 a page on our site that "expires," to a page that's related, but never expires, just to utilize the inbound link juice?
Our company gets inbound links from news websites that write stories about upcoming sporting events. The links we get are pointing to our event / ticket inventory pages on our commerce site. Once the event has passed, that event page is basically a dead page that shows no ticket inventory, and has no content. Also, each “event” page on our site has a unique url, since it’s an event that will eventually expire, as the game gets played, or the event has passed. Example of a url that a news site would link to: mysite.com/tickets/soldier-field/t7493325/nfc-divisional-home-game-chicago bears-vs-tbd-tickets.aspx Would there be any negative ramifications if I set up a 301 from the dead event page to another page on our site, one that is still somewhat related to the product in question, a landing page with content related to the team that just played, or venue they play in all season. Example, I would 301 to: mysite.com/venue/soldier-field tickets.aspx (This would be a live page that never expires.) I don’t know if that’s manipulating things a bit too much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ticket_King1 -
Is a 404, then a meta refresh 301 to the home page OK for SEO?
Hi Mozzers I have a client that had a lot of soft 404s that we wanted to tidy up. Basically everything was going to the homepage. I recommended they implement proper 404s with a custom 404 page, and 301 any that really should be redirected to another page. What they have actually done is implemented a 404 (without the custom 404 page) and then after a short delay 301 redirected to the homepage. I understand why they want to do this as they don't want to lose the traffic, but is this a problem with SEO and the index? Or will Google treat as a hard 404 anyway? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
New Website Look/Structure - Should I Redirect or Update Pages w/ Quality Inbound Links
This questing is regarding an ecommerce website that I hand wrote(html) in 1997. One of the first click and buy websites, with cart/admin system that I also developed. After all this time, the Old plain HTML look just doesnt cut it. I just updated to XHTML w/ a very modern look, and believe the structured data will index better. All products and current category pages will have the identical vrls taken from the old version. I decided to go with the switch after manual penalty, which has since been removed... I figured now is the time to update. My big question is that over the years, a lot of my backlinks came from products/news that are either no longer relevant or just not available. The pages do exist, but can only be found from the Outbound Link Source. For SEO purposes, I have thought a few things I can do but can't decide which one is the best choice. Any Insight or suggestions would be Awesome! 1. Redirect the old link to the most relevant page in my current catalog. 2. Add my new header/footer to old page(this will add a navigation bar w/ brands/cats/etc) 3. Simply add a nice new image to the top of these pages linking home & update any broken/irrelevant links. I was also considering adding just the very top 2 inches of my header(logo,search box, phone, address) *note, some of these pages do receive some traffic. Nothing huge, but consider the 50+ pages, it ads up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Google+ Personal Page pass link juice?
I noticed recently that a clients google plus business page (Set up as a personal page) has a followed link pointing to their site. They have many links on the web pointing to the google+ page, however that page is an https page. So the question is, would a google+ page that is https still pass authority and link juice to the site linked in the about us tab?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Link Building for "State" informational pages
I have a webpage for all 50 states for specific info relating to relocation and was wondering if there are any recommended links to work at getting for these pages. I would like to do "state" specific and possibly health related links for each page to help in the SEO rankings. I can see that if I just wanted to get 10 links on each page that is going to be 500 links I have to build and it is going to be very time consuming but I feel it is necessary. Thank you, Poo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
SEO Penalties for Splitting Page for Two Store Locations
Hello fellow SEO'ers! I have a question regarding the overall SEO implications of using a single page to describe the services/products offered at two different locations. The locations are in two different states/cities. I have tried to explain to the client that I working with that this is essentially splitting the page in two from a search ranking perspective. I have a feeling that Google sees this page as partially dedicated to one city, and partly to another... meaning that it won't rank as well as it could for either city. Is my thinking correct? Seems logical. The client has done this site-wide for every service/product that they offer in their facilities. I'm offering some title/description recommendations for the entire site right now, and I'm going back and forth with myself whether to include the city names in the titles and descriptions at all. Let me know what you smart folks think. I appreciate it. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theBREWROOM0