Spammy 404s: Should I Worry?
-
One of my sites is getting a ton of spammy 404s with porno-like URLs. All of these 404s are linked from other sites that I assume also got hacked, and when I click on them, they are also 404s.
So I'm assuming some spam site is tricking the Googlebot into thinking these URLs exist. But is this going to affect my site & SEO directly?
Is it worth disavowing all of the sites linking to me? Is Google even considering these real links? Did these pages ever actually exist anywhere?
Don't have a hacker-brain whatsoever so I need some enlightening.
I've been told I shouldn't worry but it seems like something I should worry about...Any help is greatly appreciated
(I've updated to the newest Wordpress and Sucuri).
-
The pages definitely don't exist anywhere.
Does this mean I have nothing to worry about?
-
There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.
Often those injected spam URLs are hidden using javascript. There's a Chrome plugin called Quick Javascript Switcher that will let you toggle JS on and off. Once it's off, if there are injected URLs on your site, you should be able to see them.
-
The first thing I recommend is to make sure that those are actually 404 errors on your site that the search engines (and regular users) can see. There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.
I would look in Google to see if those 404 pages on your site are indexed. Try a site:yourdomain.com search to see if they're indexed. Then, use a crawler to crawl your own website to see if the crawler can find those 404 pages.
Typically, when you see those errors, the site has been hacked and now they've been removed. Or, those pages are on your site but when you go to them they appear to be 404s. I recommend you investigate this further to make sure that the pages or the errors do not exist.
-
As to should you worry, we need more info. Of all the links you show in a tool like ahrefs or Majestic, what percentage are these links?
Can you pm me a sample of one or two of them? I will be happy to tell you what I think once I am clear on what they are. We also do a ton with WP so could probably give you some direction there. I am only saying PM so that you can disclose if you don't want to disclose in public. I am not going to in any way try to sell you on our services and if you wanted service I would refer you as I don't like people hawking through Moz Q&A.
Best -
Hi there
Has this been an ongoing issue and you are seeing more and more 404 links coming in? If so, Google has ways of notifying them on potentially spammy / hacked websites, so you could start there.
If it's something where these links are taking up a good portion of your backlink profile, I would do a quick audit and possibly disavow. This may take a bit of work, so if you're not comfortable, Moz has a great recommended companies list of agencies / consultants that will be more than happy to help.
Let me know if this helps or if you have any more questions! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Worried About Broken Links
In Wordpress, I'm using a plugin called Broken Link Checker to check for broken links. Should I be worried about/spend time fixing outbound links that result in: 403 Forbidden -Server Not Found -Timeout -500 Internal Server Error -etc. Thanks for your help! Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety3 -
Spammy structured data for http://www.heritageprinting.com/ might be dropped from search results
We received the above message, which I'm see may also have. Before I go making hours of edits can someone give me an opinion on what may need fixed? Here's a link to one of our products: http://heritageprinting.com/products/step-and-repeat.phpAll products are uniquely marked upIt may be the $ dollar sign, but I'm not certain.Looking at WMT > Search Appearance > Structured Data, I see no errors for Schema Markup. TY in advance :)KJr
Technical SEO | | KevnJr0 -
Hundreds of Thousand Spammy Backlinks Overnight
Hello,
Technical SEO | | JDLitchfield
I have a client who unfortunately got breached (not sure how) and as a result 6 HTML files promoting gucci bags and Louis Vuitton bags were put in the root.
I found the files within a week of them being put there but what I didn't realise (and only found yesterday when looking at the backlink profile) was that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of spammy domains pointing at these files. Some of the sites 404 but some are posts on other bloggers sites who auto accept comments and they total 10,000 links so impossible to remove. Question is: Will Google understand what has happened and ignore these links (especially because the pages don't exist on the server?) Should I use the Disavow tool to block these 1000 odd domains (can it do any harm?) and more links are being found every day so do I just keep doing it? Is there another way to explain to Google what has happened? Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
James0 -
Webmaster Tools Manual Actions - Should I Disavow Spammy Links??
My website has a manual action against it in webmaster tools stating; Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole I have checked the link profile of my site and there are over 4,000 spammy links from one particular website which I am guessing this manual action refers to. There is no way that I will be able to get these links removed so should I be using Google's Disavow Tool or is there no need? Any ideas would be appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Site dropped after I removed spammy KW-stuffed section from homepage
An SEO newbie. I took a sabbatical from my site for 10 months for personal reasons & I'm now coming back to it for the first time and facing a number of issues that I'd appreciate some advice on. 1) In the past week, my rankings for my main keywords have suddenly plummeted from ~#7 - #8 to about #25. The only thing I've done in that time is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and clean up a spammy-looking keyword-stuffed section at the foot of my homepage. (It read: Red keyword | blue keyword | green keyword | yellow keyword ... 20 times). I've kept the links (to internal pages of my site) but removed keywords. I've no social presence whatsoever. No Twitter, Facebook, Digg, G+, Google Places, nothing -- but I can't imagine this is behind the sudden drop. 2) Last year my rankings start to fall in late April. But for the first two months or so the drop was only from #1 to #2 - #3. I put it down to Penguin as my backlink profile is not ideal. About 5 years ago some SEO got me a mass of sitewide blog footer links with exact-match anchors -- some of which still remain. (Some domains have 750-plus links pointing back to my site). I've a sitewide banner (2,500 pages) on a site with a related theme to mine. I've loads of links from article directory sites (from when I knew no better). * Question: In Google Webmaster Tools I have not (yet?) received an unnatural links warning. Should I still clean up the links with the Link Disavow tool?
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Google WMT continues reporting fixed 404s - why?
I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring. This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc. Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them. By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back. The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors. The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere. Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again? Thanks -Juanita
Technical SEO | | VoxxiVoxxi0 -
Should I worry about errors MozBot finds but is not on my sitemap?
MozBot crawled a found a couple errors that isn't included on my sitemap plugin, such as duplicate page content on author pages. Should I worry about things not on my sitemap?
Technical SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
Does Selling the Same Product on Different Domains Look Spammy?
Today, I have watched such a great video on YouTube from Google Webmaster Help with following subject. Does selling the same product on three different domains look spammy? Now, I have same issue with my three websites. You can find out details as follow. Traditional Table Lamp in Brushed Steel Finsih with Green Glass http://www.lampslightingandmore.com/50_63_21594/traditional-table-lamp-in-brushed-steel-finsih-with-green-glass.html http://www.vistastores.com/indoorlighting-roycelighting-rtl50091-12b.html 7.5' Patio Umbrella Push Tilt - Olefinhttp://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.htmlhttp://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.htmlThere are three different website with 4000+ same products, same Title tag, same Meta description, same price, same details, same SKU number, same images and same details.There are very few pages indexed by Google for VistaStores.com. [I have submitted series of question on SEOmoz Q & A forum to resolve my website's crawling issue.]I assume that, this is one of biggest reason to stop my crawling. So, How can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0