Alrogthimc penalty due to pharma hack that created drug links to home page. What to do?

[iAnalyst.com]

Our site: Starcitylimo.com got destroyed by a pharma styled hack to their wordpress site. After having to re build the site from scratch to remove the virus, it was found that hundreds or even thousands of pharma links from overseas sites point to his home page (so we can't just 404 the pages).

Contacting the sites for removal does nothing. Added to dissavow 4 months ago did nothing. He's page 5 for every keyword he was position 5 or better for.

Is this one of those situations where its time to move on to a new domain?

[RobMay]

Where are the links embedded? On the actual pages of your site (internal)? On the homepage? In the back-end of Wordpress (as you said it was a virus)??? Provide a little more detail and we may be able to find the right solution. Each of which would be different based on the various types of links going out to his site.

Thanks, Rob

[Travis_Bailey]

Majestic SEO is still crawling thousands of 'new' bad links. I can't really say what Google bot is doing. I also don't know what domains you've disavowed.

The good news is, Majestic shows that it appears to be at least ebbing. I would revisit GWT backlinks and look for anything new. Know that you're barely getting 10% of the picture, if that.

I would hate to give up on a domain that's ten years old, but it looks like there's a little more history to understand. Plug it into SEM rush and slide the scale back to 'all time'.

[iAnalyst.com]

GTW backlinks is only 10% of Majestic? I've never seen this data before, and that would make zero sense if Google employees penalties on websites for links but does not provide the list of all the external links they find. I know the summary is all thats provided in GTW but the download is supposed to all inclusive, or so I have been lead to understand...

Either way, these links are IMPOSSIBLE to remove. So if Google webmaster Disavow doesn't actually work at removing penalties (algorithimic in nature) what then can we do?

[iAnalyst.com]

Hello Rob, as I mentioned hundreds of these links point to his home page. I have already changed the URL's and content on the other pages and let them 404.

If you search wordpress Pharma hack you can read all about it. But needless to say we fixed the hack, the problem is just the inbound links and the nasty algorithmic penalty that he has. The notice we got from Google that the site was compromised was removed 4 weeks ago, and rankings went from beyond page 10 to mostly page 5-6.

[Travis_Bailey]

GWT definitely doesn't show you the whole picture. Majestic SEO won't show you the whole picture. Ahrefs or OSE can't show you the whole picture either.

Google has a pretty good idea of your link inventory. They share very little. In my understanding, the spreadsheet you download is just what they've shown you until it's no longer there.

No one set of link data is ever 100%. It's a big internet, but the one source that appears to generally share the least amount of data is Google. That's why you should use multiple sets of link data and do some spreadsheet wizardry to sort out the duplicates.

The general consensus regarding how long it takes to get a link penalty lifted is; "It takes as long as it takes." Some have taken up to a year and a few turned around fairly fast. Four months isn't exactly irregular.

Majestic is showing a lot of deleted links, so there's definitely some progress there. It's just hard to see the wheat from the chaff at a glance. Yeah, the backlink profile was hit hard.

Regarding the 404s... letting them 404 is just wasting crawl budget. It may be a good idea to 410 those and let the bots know those pages aren't there. In regard to what pages were dropped, you might have lost some pretty good links. I haven't done a page level audit, but losing good links with a ton of bad can delay the process as well.

Someone is going to chime in about the 'foundation' of links, and they would be correct. It's a whole other screed - so I'll leave it to them. Seriously, this one looks pretty nasty. Best of luck.

[iAnalyst.com]

Thanks Travis, wow well I had never heard that about WMT. After reading countless link removal, penalty removal, SEO articles on moz and around the web I've never heard the download Google gives you isn't sufficient. I know it lags way behind others, but wow thats news people need to know.

It sounds like its time to move the site and move the good links we have with it then. More time is definitely not an option and with the majority being foreign spam, I don't believe we can control the link removal process successfully.

Thanks Again!

[Travis_Bailey]

No problem, it looks like you have a pretty involved project ahead of you. I would do a page level audit in GWT, Majestic and aHrefs. Be very careful which pages you 301.

If you want to be surgical - you can try getting good links changed to the new domain. That will be incredibly time consuming.

Regarding GWT reporting, I had a client that bought a link farm and did a blanket redirect... right smack into their root domain. Ouch. Luckily they had administrative control of said link farm - when the sitewide footer links were removed - it took about a month for GWT to remove them from link reports. Mileage may vary. Part of it depends on Google knowing it's not there - at least for the purposes of GWT reporting.

They had about 2,000,000+ backlinks. A lot of them were sitewides, another portion was article spam and blog spam. Some of it was just scraped. I wanted to remove at least 500,000 (just to be cautious) they only allowed 30K. But I got the link farm out of there. The site stabilized - but it was clear they needed to remove more. Such is life.

It would have been a great recovery story.