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
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
-
Content spamming risk
If some websites, which provide information about apps in a particular niche, are publishing the same content which we have given in our app's description when they refer our app for that particular niche then would it lead to spamming? Our website is getting a backlink from one such website so are we at any sort of risk? What should we do about it without having to lose that backlink?
Technical SEO | | Reema240 -
From: http://www. to https://
Hi all, I am changing my hosting for legal and SEO reasons from http://www to https:// . Now I hear different stories on the redirects: 1: should i try and change my backlinks? 2: internally all links will be 301 redirected at first. Than I want to (manually) change them. It;s within Wordpress so there should be a plugin for this. Tips? 3: Will it affect my rankings and for what period? What I now know that at first it will drop little but eventually you will rank higher than before. Thanks so much in advance! Tymen
Technical SEO | | Tymen1 -
Creating a Landing Page with a Separate Domain to Control Bounce Rate
I work with a unique situation where we have a site that gets tons of free traffic from internal free resources. We do make revenue from this traffic, but due to its nature, it has a high bounce rate. Data shows that once someone from this source does click a second page, they are engaged, so they either bounce or click multiple pages. After testing various landing pages, I've determined that the best solution would be to create a landing page on a separate domain and hide it from the search engines (to prevent duplicate content and the appearance of link farming). The theory is that once they click through to the site, they will bounce at a lower rate and improve the stats of the website. The landing page would essentially filter out this bad traffic. My question is, how sound is this theory? Will this cause any issues with Google or any other search engines?
Technical SEO | | jhacker0 -
How to handle New Page/post with site map
Hi, I've created and submitted to google (through webmaster tool) a site map with the WP plugin XML google maps. Now I've created new pages and posts. My question is: do i have to recreate and re submit another site map to google or can i just submit to google the new pages and posts with the option 'FETCH AS GOOGLE' ? Tx so much in advance.
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages
Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
How to fix duplicate page content error?
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. The example of links that has duplicate page content error are http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348855 http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348852 These are not duplicate pages. There are some values that are different on both pages like listing # , equipnet tag # , price. I am not sure how do highlight the different things the two page has like the "Equipment Tag # and listing #". Do they resolve if i use some style attribute to highlight such values on page? Please help me with this as i am not really sure why seo is thinking that both pages have same content. Thanks !!!
Technical SEO | | RGEQUIPNET0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Htm vs. aspx page extensions & duplicate content
We have a client whose site is fairly new. There isn't much in the way of SEO results so far. In their content management system they have implemented friendly URLs and changed the extensions from aspx to htm. Now the htm pages are all indexed in Google but when I run a campaign report in SEOmoz it shows that all pages are duplicated with there being both htm and aspx pages for each page. Should we do 301 redirects from the aspx pages to the htm pages? Or would we be safe by removing the htm pages and letting Google reindex the site with the aspx page extensions? Does Google have any kind of preference as to what the page extensions are as long as the URLs include keywords?
Technical SEO | | IvieDigital0