Website Vulnerability Leading to Doorway Page Spam. Need Help.

[waqid]

Keywords he is ranking for , houston dwi lawyer, houston dwi attorney and etc..

Client was acquired in June and since then we have done nothing but build high quality links to the website. None of our clients were dropped/dinged or impacted by the panda/penguin updates in 2012 or updates previously published via Google. Which proves we do quality SEO work. We went ahead and started duplicating links which worked for other legal clients and 5 months later this client is either dropping or staying in local maps results and we are performing very badly in organic results.

Some more history.....

When he first engaged our company we switched his website from a CMS called plone to word press. During our move I ran some searches to figure out which pages we needed to 301 and we came across many profile pages or member pages created on the clients CMS (PLONE). These pages were very spammy and linked to other plone sites using car model,make,year type keywords (ex:jeep cherokee dealerships). I went through these sites to see if they were linking back and could not find any back links to my clients website. Obviously nobody authorized these pages, they all looked very hackish and it seemed as though there was a vulnerability on his plone CMS installation which nobody caught.

Fast forward 5 months and the newest OSE update is showing me a good 50+ back links with unrelated anchor text back links. These anchor text links are the same color as the background and can only be found if you hover your mouse over certain areas of the site. All of these sites are built on Plone and allot of them are linked to other businesses or community websites. These websites obviously have no clue they have been hacked or are being used for black hat purposes.

There are dozens of unrelated anchor text links being used on external websites which are pointing back to our clients website.

Examples: <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">autex Isuzu, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">Toyota service department ratings, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">die cast BMW and etc..</a>

Obviously the first step is to use the disavow link tool, which will be completed this week.

The second step is to take some feedback from the SEO community. It seems like these pages are automatically created using some type of bot. It will be very tedious if we have to continually remove these links. I hope there is a way to notify Google that these websites are all plone and have a vulnerability, which black hats are using to harm the innocent...

If i cannot get Google to handle this, then the only other option is to start fresh with a new domain name.

What would you do in this situation. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you

[waqid]

any help on this

[waqid]

Amazing i could not get a response on this.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, even across the broader community, specific technical issues with specific CMS platforms can be really hard to find an answer to. You need someone who's been in exactly your situation, in most cases. I'm seeing multiple mentions on the web for Plone security holes:

http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106-announcement

If you think this is primarily an issue of these bad links, then using the new disavow tool is your best (if imperfect) option right now, most likely. Otherwise, you're left contacting each website to let them know they have a hole. If you think this is a new vulnerability, you could try to work with Plone directly, but that would rely on all of these sites patching the hole. In other words, even if Plone releases a fix, everyone has to actually apply it, and that often doesn't happen. So, cutting off the links via Google is probably more effective.

Given that you switched platforms, though, I'd really dig deep and make sure you haven't run into other problems. For example, did the WordPress switch introduce new duplicate content? Did any of your TITLE tags, URLs, or other on-page factors change? Are they links you're "duplicating" starting to look like a network to Google? It's entirely possible for one site to get hit and not others, especially in a competitive vertical. I'd look long and hard at your whole portfolio and make sure this isn't a signal that something worse is about to happen.

That's conjecture, but I've just seen too many SEO companies jump to the conclusion of foul play, only to miss something they had control over. Make sure you're looking at the whole picture.

[waqid]

Thanks for the reply. We got the clients primary domain (internal pages were always fine) out of penalization by using the disavow tool and still our rankings have not come back.

Furthermore it looks like we found about 4k new links pointing back to pages which were redirected automatically to the home page upon creation of wordpress (wordpress 301 plugins). We changed the landing page for 301's to be a .com/lost page and that page is setup as no follow/index.

When it comes to the on page factors, I think the domain it self has too many pages talking about DWI. Posts that is. My next step is to remove all these Spammy blog posts (real news however) and see if that gives us a return in rankings.

When it comes to the duplicating links, i am definitely not over exchanging links between clients . Occasionally i will link one or two clients because they are beneficial to one another (personal injury links to a divorce lawyer in the same city). But the majority of links are pr's, he directories, web 2.0 and other links from industry sites.

Picking up a client from a horrible SEO company is probably the hardest project i have picked up thus far and i just picked up two more.... FML

From scratch we can pull a new website from zero to top of page one in 6months, but this has me stumped.

Thanks for your help and maybe one day i will do a write up about my solutions.

[Dr-Pete]

I've definitely seen issues lately where mass 301-ing a lot of pages all to one page caused some problems with Google. If there were bad/suspicious links to some of those pages, it could definitely exacerbate the problem. You may have to try killing some of those redirects, especially from the worst pages. If you don't get traffic to those pages and you know the links are suspect (whether or not you created them), I'd strongly consider 404-ing some of those pages and cutting the redirects. How deep you have to cut depends on how bad the damage is and how much risk you're willing to take. It's definitely not for the faint of heart, but if the situation is bad enough, it may be necessary.

[waqid]

Thanks for the thought.

I'm going to give it a try, didn't think about that. Nothing special about our 301's.