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Spam URL'S in search results
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We built a new website for a client.
When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too.
Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS.
When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs.
All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though.
What is going on and how can I fix it?
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Whoa, this is a weird one.
I saw that you posted this on Google's forums as well, and they suggested that this might be the Japanese keyword hack. Did you look into that? If that's not it, did you try loading the URLs that are showing up on the Wayback Machine? It's possible that someone who owned this site before your client created these pages.
Either way, the answer is to double check that your 404 pages really are 404ing. If that doesn't remove them from the index fast enough, you can actually create all of those pages, with a noindex tag, add them all to a sitemap, and submit them to Google. But the 404ing is really your long term solution.
Good luck!
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