URL Index Removal for Hacked Website - Will this help?
-
My main question is: How do we remove URLs (links) from Google's index and the 1000s of created 404 errors associated with them after a website was hacked (and now fixed)?
The story: A customer came to us for a new website and some SEO. They had an existing website that had been hacked and their previous vendor was non-responsive to address the issue for months. This created THOUSANDS of URLs on their website that were then linked to pornographic and prescription med SPAM sites. Now, Google has 1,205 pages indexed that create 404 errors on the new site. I am confident these links are causing Google to not rank well organically.
Additional information:
- Entirely new website
- Wordpress site
- New host
Should we be using the "Remove URLs" tool from Google to submit all 1205 of these pages? Do you think it will make a difference? This is down from the 22,500 URLs that existed when we started a few months back. Thank you in advance for any tips or suggestions!
-
Yes.
Disavow needed for each site (http/https).
-
Thanks for clearing this out.
If i have spammy links on http version, but my site is now https, i should upload the same disavow list on both http and https? (i saw one answer of yours in other thread saying just that , and i think is important because many of us are missing this detail) -
If they are not your - it's better to disavow them. If they are spammy - disavow them.
Those links may hurt your ranking.
-
Hi Pete, something in your answer got my attention.
Like one month ago , i saw some (as was proven later) spammy links pointing to one specific page of my site. Those links ( from 20+ domains) were coming from some german domain names with the ltd .xyz extension.
Now the links don't actually exists, but those referring pages saying 410 Gone (nginx server).
Is that bad for that spesific page of mine?
I never saw in past this http status. -
If your "bad" link is like http://OURDOMAIN/flibzy/foto-bugil-di-kelas.html then your .htaccess should be:
Redirect 410 /flibzy/foto-bugil-di-kelas.html
that's all.Yes - you should do this for ALL 1205 URLs. Don't do this on legal pages (before hacking), just on hacked pages. I say "gone" with 410 redirect. It's amazing. In your case gone for good. Time for identify that 1205 URLs and paste them into .htaccess is let's say X hours. Time for identify that 1205 URLs and temporary remove them is Y hours. Since "temporary removal" is up to 30 days this make same job each month. In total for one year you have X in first case and 12*Y in second case. You can see difference, right?
Also today Barry Adams release story about hacking:
http://www.stateofdigital.com/website-hacked-manual-penalty-google/
and it's amazing that site was hacked just for 4 hours but Google notice this. You can see there traffic drop and removal from SERP. Ok, i'm not trying to "fear sells", but keeping bad pages with 404 will take long time. In Jan-Feb 2012 i have new temporary site on mine site within /us/ folder and even today Jan 2016 i still receiving bots crawling this folder. That's why i nuke it with 410. This save the day!On your case it's same. Bot is wasting time and resources to crawl 404 pages over and over but crawling less your important pages. That's why it's good to nuke them. ONLY them. This will save bot crawling budget on your website. So bot can focus on your pages.
-
Hi Peter,
Thank you for your response! I saw you answered a similar question about a week ago, so thank you for weighing in on my options. So, to clarify, I must do this for all 1,205 of the URLs?
One SPAM link is pointing here: http://OURDOMAIN/flibzy/foto-bugil-di-kelas.html so in your above example, this would look like:
Redirect 410 /dir/http://OURDOMAIN/flibzy/foto-bugil-di-kelas.html/ (?) and do this for each page that Google has indexed?
I saw your example with the iphone on the other post. How did you get that page to say, GONE - The requested resource...
-
The best is to keep them 404. But fast is to 410 them.
All you need is to place this topmost somewhere of .htaccess:
Redirect 410 /dir/url1/
Redirect 410 /dir/url2/
Redirect 410 /dir1/url3/
Redirect 410 /dir1/url4/But this won't help you if your URLs have parameters somewhere like index.php?spamword1-blah-blah. For this you need extended version like this:
RewriteEngine on
#RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} spamword
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /404.html? [R=410,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} spamword1
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /404.html? [R=410,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} spamword2
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /404.html? [R=410,L]So why 410? 410 act much faster than 404 but it's DANGEROUS! If you sent 410 to normal URL this is effective nuking it. I found that with 410 bot visit this url 1-2-3 times, but with 404 bot keep visiting over and over eating your crawling budget. URL removal in SearchConsole is OK, but it's fast but works only for 30 days. And will eat almost same time as building list for 404/410s. Hint: You can speedup crawling if you do "fetch and render" then submit to index.
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
-
Index Bloat: Canonicalize, Redirect or Delete URLs?
I was doing some simple on-page recommendations for a client and realized that they have a bit of a website bloat problem. They are an ecommerce shoe store and for one product, there could be 10+ URLs. For example, this is what ONE product looks like: example.com/products/shoename-color1 example.com/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color2 ...and so on... all for the same shoe. They have about 20-30 shoes altogether, and some come in 4-5 colors. This has caused some major bloat on their site and I assume some confusion for the search engine. That said, I'm trying to figure out what the best way to tackle this is from an SEO perspective. Here's where I've gotten to so far: Is it better to canonicalize all URLs, referencing back to one "main" one, delete all bloat pages re-link everything to the main one(s), or 301 redirect the bloat URLs back to the "main" one(s)? Or is there another option that I haven't considered? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AJTSEO0 -
Will this affect
Hi there! I've got a question that I'm having trouble answering. My client has one site url essentially has two sites within it. The homepage (name-photography.com) content focuses on her fashion photography services with a specific design and look with almost no mention of weddings unless you click the weddings icon. When you click on weddings, it takes you to a "new" site on the same url (name-photography.com/weddings) that has entirely different look and feel. The client would like to improve her visibility for her wedding services and not the fashion photography side. Would it be more beneficial to house the wedding services on an entirely new URL so that homepage content can be wedding focused. Again, with the current homepage, it's all fashion photography focused and not easy to redo. Or could one implement a 301 redirect from the fashion homepage (name-photographer.com) to the wedding homepage (name-photographer.com/weddings)? Thanks for your advice! Jessica
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zigzen0 -
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
Index or not index Categories
We are using Yoast Seo plugin. On the main menu we have only categories which has consist of posts and one page. We have category with villas, category with villa hotels etc. Initially we set to index and include in the sitemap posts and excluded categories, but I guess it was not correct. Would be a better way to index and include categories in the sitemap and exclude the posts in order to avoid the duplicate? It somehow does not make sense for me, If the posts are excluded and the categories included, will not then be the categories empty for google? I guess I will get crazy of this. Somebody has perhaps more experiences with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
Website Displayed by Google as Https: when all Secure Content is Blocked - Causing Index Prob.
Basically, I have no inbound likes going to https://www.mysite.com , but google is indexing the Homepage only as https://www.mysite.com In June, I was re included to the google index after receiving a penalty... Most of my site links recovered fairly well. However my homepage did not recover for its top keywords. Today I notice that when I search for my site, its displayed as https:// Robots.txt blocks all content going to any secure page. Leaving me sort of clueless what I need to do to fix this. Not only does it pose a problem for some users who click, but I think its causing the homepage to have an indexing problem. Any ideas? Redirect the google bot only? Will a canonical tag fix this? Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Member request pages, indexed or no indexed?
We run a service website and basically users of the site post their request to get certain items fixed/serviced. Through Google Analytics we have found that we got lots of traffic to these request pages from people searching for those particular items. E.g. A member's request page: "Cost to fix large Victorian oven" has got many visits from searchers searching for "large Victorian oven". The traffic to these pages is about 40% of our Google organic traffic but didn't covert to more users/requests well and has roughly 67% bounce rate. So my question is: should we keep these pages indexed and if yes what can we do to improve the conversion rate/reduce bounce rate? Many thanks guys. David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0