Spam posts indexed, what to do now?

[Gamer07]

Hi,

So we had a staff problem last week and we let some spam posts (cheap nike jerseys etc.) that also got indexed by Google. (We just checked and there are lik 105 already indexed)

Of course we have now removed all these spam posts but what is the best practice at this point? Are we supposed to do something else to remove these from Google's index? (maybe through google webmaster tools?)  We have already edited robots.txt to disallow those pages as a quick remedy.

And finally, could this have done any harm? We were quite slow noticing these posts to remove them. They were there for about 12 days.

thanks

[irvingw]

So someone was posting articles on your site that linked to other sites like paid links?

If you removed the posts no need to block them in robots.txt because they no longer exist so will not get crawled anymore. Yes definitely request removal in WMT URL removal tool and get those pages out of Google's index ASAP.

You're probably OK. Just keep your fingers crossed and an eye on rankings and run a tight ship so that doesn't happen again, definitely something you can get penalized for. Good thing you caught it quickly.

EDIT: if you meant that you let spam comments get posted live/approved by the admin then all you can do is remove the spammy posts and make sure your comment settings are set to need admin approval before getting posed live. No need to block in robots.txt or remove URLs in that case but it doesn't hurt. If the links are off of your site you should be fine.

[StreamlineMetrics]

Do you know how the spam posts were published on your site? Just make sure the vulnerability is fixed so it doesn't happen again. Once the spam posts you found have been deleted from your site, you shouldn't have to do anything more since they will fall out of Google's index. Keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools though to see if you notice any more spam pages pop up on Google's radar and then manually remove them.

Here is Google's official answer - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734

When a page is updated or removed, it will automatically fall out of our search results. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen.

However, if you urgently need to remove content from Google's search results (for example, if you’ve already removed, updated, or blocked a page accidentally displaying confidential information like credit card numbers), you can request expedited removal of those URLs.

Our removal tools are intended for pages that urgently need to be removed—for example, if they contain confidential data that was accidentally exposed. Using the tools for other purposes may cause problems for your site.

Another Google resource if your site was actually hacked or compromised - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119

To take your site "offline" after being hacked. If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created—for example, http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed. Instead, clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site.

[Gamer07]

Thanks for the quick response. We're just requesting URL removal for all those URL's. I hope this makes it all good. No sign of ranking drop at the moment. We're lucky those pages were automatically filtered out by our sitemap.xml and all those links had auto-nofollow on them. Time to consider buying a service like Mollom I guess.

[irvingw]

haha I just say you said "all those links had auto-nofollow on them"

NO PROBLEM MAN! rest easy!  You cannot get penalized for nofollow links!

[Gamer07]

Hi,

Thanks for the comprehensive answer. We don't have any vulnerabilities. It was all my fault as I completely forgot that I had given administrative access to one of our former content managers who had temporarily allowed anonymous users to post on this certain section of the site. And once he left, we forgot to update that permission and never really noticed those posts, until today.

[Gamer07]

Good to know