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
-
Deep linking with pages behind password protection?
Has anyone implemented deep linking for Apple Search (NSUserActivity/Core Spotlight) or Google Search (for Android and iOS) for an app that is behind password protection? Interested in seeing whether this is even possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content (with and without www)
How can we resolve pages with duplicate page content? With and without www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
Thanks in advance.0 -
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 -
Do search engines crawl links on 404 pages?
I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site's 404 page. I know there's all sorts of best practices from UX standpoint but what about search engines? Since these pages are roadblocks in the crawl process, I was wondering if there's a way to help the search engine continue its crawl. Does putting links to "recent posts" or something along those lines allow the bot to continue on its way or does the crawl stop at that point because the 404 HTTP status code is thrown in the header response?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
Dynamically creating unique page titles on enterprise site
Hi, I want to dynamically create unique page titles (possible meta descriptions too) on a 10k page site. Many of the page titles are either duplicates or are missing. I heard about the option of grabbing the page titles from a database or possibly using the h1 as the page title. solmelia.com (the website consist of mostly static pages) Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Best Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
Hi, I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error. Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content. I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links". Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla. Thanks a lot for your help Marco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcodublin0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0