I'm Getting Attacked, What Can I Do?

[CleanEdisonInc]

I recently noticed a jump in my Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

Upon further investigation I found hundreds of the most spammy web pages I've ever seen pointing to my domain (although all going to 404 errors):

http://blurchelsanog1980.blog.com/

http://lenitsky.wordpress.com/

These are all created within the last week.

A. What the hell is going on?

B. Should I be very concerned? (because they are 404 errors)

C. What should my next steps be?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[LesleyPaone]

My first step would be to start disavowing all of the links in Google before you get a penalty. It is a pain, but it is worth it compared to getting dropped out of the SERP's.

[AISFM]

Have a look at these:

http://www.cleanedison.com/order-generic-cialis-online.html

http://www.cleanedison.com/cialis-price-increase.html

Has your site been hacked?

[Travis_Bailey]

As Chris H said, your site has been hacked. Your WordPress blog is terribly out of date. There are a few blog plugins that are out of date.

Who do you know that are allowed to access the blog? I have four users listed. I'm guessing admin has been compromised.

[evolvingSEO]

I'm not so sure I'd jump to the conclusion you've been hacked so quickly (as a few other answers have mentioned). You just have bad backlinks pointing at your site, right? No pages have been created ON your website that you did not allow correct?

If so, it does sound like some sort of negative SEO link building. Be hard to tell how/why they were built without a big analysis - but anyhow - you can disavow them. But I would also look deeper into why they have happened to begin with. Could it be a competitor or someone who has decided to make enemies with you?

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

I see you have deleted the malicious pages appearing on your website - they now return 404 server responses. Unfortunately Google still has several of these pages indexed: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cleanedison.com+%22cialis%22&oq=cleanedison.com+%22cialis%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1741j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8

It should not take long for these URLs to drop out of the index. When these spam links point to 404 pages, they should not damage your domain but if you see negative rankings movements, the disavow tool is a good option. It can also be used pre-emptively if you are particularly concerned about the volume of these pam links coming in.

[LesleyPaone]

To expound on what Jane said, I would actually rewrite the headers of these pages to a 410 status code. That way they will drop out of the ranking quicker. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2340728/Matt-Cutts-on-How-Google-Handles-404-410-Status-Codes

[JaneCopland]

Good call Lesley!