Someone Added Spammy 1000's pages without my knowledge - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld - WebmasterWorld

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Someone Added Spammy 1000's pages without my knowledge

venunath

7:40 am on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Hello All,

Someone created and added 1000's of spammy or malicious pages in my website without my knowledge. And those spammy or malicious (pages) are posted in forums, blogs, gaming domains and non English language websites.

Because of this my backlink profile is changed and showing all spammy websites as ref domains

and all backlink anchor texts are not relevant at all...:(

All Spammy 1000's pages pages are landing to 404 in GWT.

Action Taken from my End:

1) Removed all spammy or malicious pages from my website and submitted for removal request.
2) All account and hosting login credential are reset
3) Scanned the entire website to cross check the spammy or malicious pages is there or not
4) Submitted reconsideration request via GWT and its revoke but still backlink profile is not updated.

I lost my all keyword positions and drop in traffic by 80%. Unable to understand what to do? I am searching for solution in different forums and trying to get out of this drain.

Can anyone suggest me what to do?

[edited by: goodroi at 11:32 am (utc) on May 2, 2014]
[edit reason] Removed spam examples [/edit]

dethfire

11:55 am on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Join the club. The unfortunate lesson is that we need to be on guard to spam 24/7 and close as many doors as we can. I had two forum communities that were nailed by spammers and they exploited some areas I didn't know to look in. Anyway, same as you once I found it all, it was too late. All you can do is close the doors, clean it up and pray to Google.

venunath

12:06 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

dethfire - Thanks for your suggestions but still its not clear . Anyone can suggest..

dethfire

12:10 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Did you get a manual penalty? What was the result of your reconsideration request? Did you submit a disavow list? All you really can do is clean up and wait.

venunath

12:36 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Yes, I have received a notification in GWT - Manual Action - "Some pages on this site may have been hacked by a third party to display spammy content or links. You should take a immediate action to clean your site and fix any security vulnerability."

For this - notification - i have cleaned up my entire website and submitted for Reconsideration request for that i got reply = "After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action".

And submitted Disavow file too. But its almost 3 months no changes found in my keyword positions nor in ranking. And still i am getting those spamm pages in GWT in Crawl Errors (404)

What to dooo?

dethfire

12:39 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

venunath I'd love to hear advice from others because we are in the same boat. I sent in a disavow list months go with no effect and also cleared up all my spam and sent in a reconsideration request and still the penalty exists for months. Good luck!

venunath

12:44 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Is your reconsideration request accepted ? Did they revoked manual action? In my case its accepted and they have revoked.

But still i am getting those spammy pages in form of 404 in GWT via external links. And by backlink profile is not updated or rolled back yet.

dethfire

12:47 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

I don't think so. Even though I have no spam, I got some generic cryptic response and the penalty still shows up in WMT.

WMT tools is notoriously outdated and slow. Furthermore your link profile may never be the same unless the spam pages drop the links to you on their end.

venunath

12:53 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

spam pages drop the links to you on their end. - All spamm pages are landing to 404 pages so i think Google can't consider those as backlinks. They need to re-crawl the entire backlinks and update.

How we can communicate the same thing with Google and how to remove those links.

tangor

1:36 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

There is a good possibility that you will never recover your backlinks.

Though the manual has been revoked, that does not mean the algo will return to the same level it was before the penalty, in other words, it may take a year or more for the "trust" to return.

You have two choices. Stick with the site and keep working with fresh, now, quality content and hope it gets noticed, or

Shut down the site and start another, but this time taking all precautions to make sure it is as secure as possible.

I don't think you'll return to your previous levels any time soon. Wish I had better to offer.

Planet13

1:52 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

That is horrible.

I can understand how google won't trust a site if the webmaster went out and bought a bunch of spammy links. I can see how google might feel that the webmaster needs to "prove" they are trustworthy.

But if it is a technical issue that is a glitch in the CMS, well, that;s a whole different animal.

I mean, shouldn't google stop trusting any site that uses openssl now?

venunath

2:55 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

tangor - Thanks for your suggestions. but Shut down the site is very simple but start another is not easy task its takes lot of efforts to get popularity in SERP and lot of time and money.

Do you have any other suggestion to rectify the errors and bring it to back positions.

Can any one look into this and post the experiences and suggestions.

not2easy

3:38 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

There was an article posted here yesterday: [webmasterworld.com...]

We have also updated the hacked content guidelines to include redirects on compromised websites. If you believe your site has been compromised, follow these instructions to identify the issues on your site and fix them.

The full post has a link to Google's recommendations for sites that have been affected.

tangor

3:54 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Shut down the site is very simple but start another is not easy task its takes lot of efforts to get popularity in SERP and lot of time and money.

Either way it is time and money. We may want to live in a moral world, but sadly there there is a real world. View the links not2easy shared above for g's suggestions. And bear in mind that there are all too many reports here at Webmasterworld that g works at their speed, not ours.

Even so, there's no guarantee that you will quickly recover all your lost traffic, or ever, or even that G will grant trust. After all... (ahem) your site was not secured and was compromised. They (g) will have to see if you have corrected those errors... and that will take time.

During that time you can either maintain and expand the site, embracing all other search engines, or close the door. I'm just the messenger, not the fixer of all things (wish I were, can you imagine what kind of website THAT would be? LOL!)

rish3

6:10 pm on May 2, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Make the urls that have the spammy links pointing to them return "410 Gone", then go into Google Webmaster Tools and use the "url removal" tool to ensure they aren't indexed any more.

Spammy links that lead to a 410'ed page that isn't indexed shouldn't hurt you.