Website Vulnerability Leading to Doorway Page Spam. Need Help.
-
Keywords he is ranking for , houston dwi lawyer, houston dwi attorney and etc..
Client was acquired in June and since then we have done nothing but build high quality links to the website. None of our clients were dropped/dinged or impacted by the panda/penguin updates in 2012 or updates previously published via Google. Which proves we do quality SEO work. We went ahead and started duplicating links which worked for other legal clients and 5 months later this client is either dropping or staying in local maps results and we are performing very badly in organic results.
Some more history.....
When he first engaged our company we switched his website from a CMS called plone to word press. During our move I ran some searches to figure out which pages we needed to 301 and we came across many profile pages or member pages created on the clients CMS (PLONE). These pages were very spammy and linked to other plone sites using car model,make,year type keywords (ex:jeep cherokee dealerships). I went through these sites to see if they were linking back and could not find any back links to my clients website. Obviously nobody authorized these pages, they all looked very hackish and it seemed as though there was a vulnerability on his plone CMS installation which nobody caught.
Fast forward 5 months and the newest OSE update is showing me a good 50+ back links with unrelated anchor text back links. These anchor text links are the same color as the background and can only be found if you hover your mouse over certain areas of the site. All of these sites are built on Plone and allot of them are linked to other businesses or community websites. These websites obviously have no clue they have been hacked or are being used for black hat purposes.
There are dozens of unrelated anchor text links being used on external websites which are pointing back to our clients website.
Examples: <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">autex Isuzu, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">Toyota service department ratings, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">die cast BMW and etc..</a>
Obviously the first step is to use the disavow link tool, which will be completed this week.
The second step is to take some feedback from the SEO community. It seems like these pages are automatically created using some type of bot. It will be very tedious if we have to continually remove these links. I hope there is a way to notify Google that these websites are all plone and have a vulnerability, which black hats are using to harm the innocent...
If i cannot get Google to handle this, then the only other option is to start fresh with a new domain name.
What would you do in this situation. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you
-
Thanks for the thought.
I'm going to give it a try, didn't think about that. Nothing special about our 301's.
-
I've definitely seen issues lately where mass 301-ing a lot of pages all to one page caused some problems with Google. If there were bad/suspicious links to some of those pages, it could definitely exacerbate the problem. You may have to try killing some of those redirects, especially from the worst pages. If you don't get traffic to those pages and you know the links are suspect (whether or not you created them), I'd strongly consider 404-ing some of those pages and cutting the redirects. How deep you have to cut depends on how bad the damage is and how much risk you're willing to take. It's definitely not for the faint of heart, but if the situation is bad enough, it may be necessary.
-
Thanks for the reply. We got the clients primary domain (internal pages were always fine) out of penalization by using the disavow tool and still our rankings have not come back.
Furthermore it looks like we found about 4k new links pointing back to pages which were redirected automatically to the home page upon creation of wordpress (wordpress 301 plugins). We changed the landing page for 301's to be a .com/lost page and that page is setup as no follow/index.
When it comes to the on page factors, I think the domain it self has too many pages talking about DWI. Posts that is. My next step is to remove all these Spammy blog posts (real news however) and see if that gives us a return in rankings.
When it comes to the duplicating links, i am definitely not over exchanging links between clients . Occasionally i will link one or two clients because they are beneficial to one another (personal injury links to a divorce lawyer in the same city). But the majority of links are pr's, he directories, web 2.0 and other links from industry sites.
Picking up a client from a horrible SEO company is probably the hardest project i have picked up thus far and i just picked up two more.... FML
From scratch we can pull a new website from zero to top of page one in 6months, but this has me stumped.
Thanks for your help and maybe one day i will do a write up about my solutions.
-
Unfortunately, even across the broader community, specific technical issues with specific CMS platforms can be really hard to find an answer to. You need someone who's been in exactly your situation, in most cases. I'm seeing multiple mentions on the web for Plone security holes:
http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106-announcement
If you think this is primarily an issue of these bad links, then using the new disavow tool is your best (if imperfect) option right now, most likely. Otherwise, you're left contacting each website to let them know they have a hole. If you think this is a new vulnerability, you could try to work with Plone directly, but that would rely on all of these sites patching the hole. In other words, even if Plone releases a fix, everyone has to actually apply it, and that often doesn't happen. So, cutting off the links via Google is probably more effective.
Given that you switched platforms, though, I'd really dig deep and make sure you haven't run into other problems. For example, did the WordPress switch introduce new duplicate content? Did any of your TITLE tags, URLs, or other on-page factors change? Are they links you're "duplicating" starting to look like a network to Google? It's entirely possible for one site to get hit and not others, especially in a competitive vertical. I'd look long and hard at your whole portfolio and make sure this isn't a signal that something worse is about to happen.
That's conjecture, but I've just seen too many SEO companies jump to the conclusion of foul play, only to miss something they had control over. Make sure you're looking at the whole picture.
-
Amazing i could not get a response on this.
-
any help on this
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
-
Why My Website's Rank still in Millions
I am getting enough Traffic on my website on best weed killer on affiliate but Moz still showing its Rank in millions. What would be the best strategy to improve the rankings.???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sarahelen0 -
My Brand new website shows 79% spam Score, what is the reason and how should I deal with this?
Hi, I have just launched my website 1 month before and I have used all paid images, Uniquely written contents, Everything is genuine for better SEO experience in the future. The actual problem is its showing spam by 79% in MOZ bar, I don't have a single link on my website also my content is unique, Images are unique. Why its showing so much spam on this brand new website? Can you please help me? I am very stressed due to this problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rahat640 -
[SEO] Star Ratings -> Review -> Category Page
Hello there, Basically, if you put non-natural star ratings on the category page, like in the attached images, you will get manual ban from google right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shanaki
(i know it for sure, cause I had clients with this situation) The real question is:
If I put a form that allows users to write a review about the category products on the category page, for REAL, will google still ban? Any advice? Any example? With respect,
Andrei Irh0O kto4o0 -
Why would a blank page rank? What am I missing about this page?
In terms of content, this page is blank. Yes, there's a sidebar and footer, but no content. I've seen a page like this rank before. I'm curious if they're implementing something on the back-end I don't realize or if this is just a fluke? Etc. Also, the DA of the site is only a 15, so I don't think that's the reason. http://www.thenurselawyer.com/component/tags/tag/20-pasco-county-personal-injury-lawyers.html Thanks, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Suggest me a best plan for linking building chart for small static website.
Hi Everyone, Can any one suggest me a clear idea for off page link building chart i.e) Our page is a 24 page website we like to plan for off page activity like bookmarking, classifieds, directory bla bla bla. So how many links we are supposed to post and in how much day time gap example: 15 Links in bookmarking, 10 links in classified, weekly one article submission, after one week the same cycle goes on.....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dineshmap0 -
Negative SEO on my website with paid +1's
Hi guys, I need a piece of advice. Some scumbag played me quite well with paid +1's on my two articles and now I'm in a problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Fastbridge
http://sr.stateofseo.com/seo-vesti/google-implementacija-ssl-protokola-not-provided-problem/
http://sr.stateofseo.com/napredni-seo/najnovije-promene-google-panda-algoritma/
They are both translated articles (written originally by me on the same website). I've noticed those +1's (476 on both articles) when my website received a penalty for "SEO" keyword on Google.rs (Serbian Google) and I'm now on the 11th page.
Other keywords still rank just fine. Not cool, right? Now, I think there could be two solutions:
First one is to remove my inner link that's pointing to my homepage with "SEO" anchor, and hope for the best. Second one is to completely remove/delete those two articles and wait for Google to reindex the website and hopefully remove my ban. Do you guy have some other ideas how can I fix this or remove / disavow those +1 or somehow explain to the Google crew / algo that I'm just a humble SEO without any evil thoughts? 🙂 Thank you in advance.0 -
Why won't my home page rank for branded terms?
Hello, I've been trying to figure out what factors are causing my home page not to rank for my branded terms. The site is www.lipozene.com and after the late April Google algorithm our rankings have disappeared off the map for the term "lipozene". Different element of the site show up in organic rankings, including our shopping cart (http://shop.lipozene.com) as high as page two. However, the home page is not ranking organically. On Yahoo & Bing we have never dropped out of the number 1 spot. We did engage in some link building activities, however we've removed nearly all of the links that were created by our SEO guy. I did NOT receive any notifications from Google regarding their link policy. If you search for lipozene.com we rank #1. Any thoughts on what we're missing thats causing us to not rank is greatly apprecaited. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lipoweb0 -
Link Building: Location-specific pages
Hi! I've technically been a member for a few years, but just recently decided to go Pro (and I gotta say, I'm glad I did!). Anyway, as I've been researching and analyzing, one thing I noticed a competitor is doing is creating location-specific pages. For example, they've created a page that has a URL similar to this: www.theirdomain.com/seattle-keyword-phrase They have a few of these for specific cities. They rank well for the city-keyword combo in most cases. Each city-specific page looks the same and the content is close to being the same except that they drop in the "seattle keyword phrase" bit here and there. I noticed that they link to these pages from their site map page, which, if I were to guess, is how SEs are getting to those pages. I've seen this done before on other sites outside my industry too. So my question is, is this good practice or is it something that should be avoided?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AngieHerrera0