Website blog is hacked. Whats the best practice to remove bad urls
-
Hello
So our site was hacked which created a few thousand spam URLs on our domain. We fixed the issue and changed all the spam urls now return 404. Google index shows a couple of thousand bad URLs.
My question is-
What's the fastest way to remove the URLs from google index. I created a site map with sof the bad urls and submitted to Google. I am hoping google will index them as they are in the sitemap and remove from the index, as they return 404.
Any tools to get a full list of google index? ( search console downloads are limited to 1000 urls). A Moz site crawl gives larger list which includes URLs not in Google index too. Looking for a tool that can download results from a site: search.
Any way to remove the URLs from the index in bulk? Removing them one by one will take forever.
Any help or insight would be very appreciated.
-
Technically 404 means "temporarily unavailable but coming back later" so you might want to consider Status 410 instead of 404. You could also supplement it with Meta no-index, if you can't use the HTML implementation then fire the no-index directive through the HTTP header using X-robots:
https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag (scroll down a little to find the relevant part)
E.g:
"HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 21:42:43 GMT
(…)
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
(…)"... something like that.
You can't use Search Console to remove URLs from Google at all. The remove URL tool, only removes URLs one at a time and it only does so 'temporarily', the URLs pop back again after a bit. The best thing you can do is give Google some harsher directives and hope they listen, in a month or two most of those should be gone
Don't use robots.txt on the URLs as, if Google can't crawl them it won't find the 410s or the no-index directives
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
-
Submitted URL has crawl issue - Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404 - but all looks fine
Google Search Console is showing some pages up as "Submitted URL has crawl issue" but they look fine to me. I have set them as fixed but after a month they were finally re-crawled and google states the issue persists. Examples are: https://www.rscpp.co.uk/counselling/175809/psychology-alcester-lanes-end.html
Technical SEO | | TommyNewmanCEO
https://www.rscpp.co.uk/browse/location-index/889/index-of-therapy-in-hanger-lane.html
https://www.rscpp.co.uk/counselling/274646/psychology-waltham-forest-sexual-problems.html There's also some "Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404": https://www.rscpp.co.uk/counselling/112585/counselling-moseley-depression.html I also have more which are "pending", but again I couldn't see a problem with them in the first place. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. Any advice? Thanks in advance.0 -
URL Structure
Hi, Hope you are all well. On our website we have a 'blog' and a 'news' section. The blog is located on "/blog" - but when you click on a post the url structure changes to /name-of-article and the blog subdomain isn't included. Would it be better to have "blog/name-of-article as this would then make the blog perform better in search results? Also, if our news page is under /news - but when you click on an article it changes to /news-article/name-of-article Wouldn't it be better to have /news/name-of-article Thanks a lot!! 🙂
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Can I speed up removal of cache for 301'd page on unverified website?
I recently asked another website to remove a page from their website (I have no control over this website) and they have now 301'd this old URL to another - this is just what I wanted. My only aim now is to see the Google cache removed for that page as quickly as possible.
Technical SEO | | Mark_Reynolds
I'm not sure that asking the website to remove the url via WMT is the right way to go and assume I should just be waiting for Google to pick up the 301 and naturally remove the cache. But are there any recommended methods I can use to speed this process up? The old URL was last cached on 3 Oct 2014 so not too long ago. I don't think the URL is linked from any other page on the Internet now, but I guess it would still be in Google's list of URLs to crawl. Should I sit back and wait (who knows how long that would take?) or would adding a link to the old URL from a website I manage speed things up? Or would it help to submit the old URL to Google's Submission tool? URL0 -
Best way to deal with these urls?
Found overly dynamic urls in the crawl report. http://www.trespass.co.uk/camping/festivals-friendly/clothing?Product_sort=PriceDesc&utm_campaign=banner&utm_medium=blog&utm_source=Roslyn Best way to deal with these? Cheers Guys
Technical SEO | | Trespass0 -
Only my website homepage is appearing in search and the other indvidual pages are not coming up?This happened after the website revamp
We have revamped our website http://www.wsinetpower.com/ after te revamp the SEO rankings went down and the inner pages are not appearing in serach. What could be the reason
Technical SEO | | Muna0 -
Blog.furnacefilterscanada.com/ or furnacefilterscanada.com/blog/
My shopping cart does not allow to instal a WordPress blog on a sub-domain like: furnacefilterscanada.com/blog/ But I can host my blog on another server with a sub-domain like: blog.furnacefilterscanada.com In a SEO point of view is there a difference between the 2? Link juice? Page authority? Thank you, BigBlaze
Technical SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Picking a URL co.uk vs .net vs .biz which is best for SEO?
Hi I was always told that you only want a .co.uk or a .com is this still true? I am setting up an ecommerce site and the ideal .co.uk is gone! Am I better to have a longer ulr with maybe a hifen or a uk in it or is it ok to have a .biz or a .net these days? You help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks James
Technical SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0