Recovering from Black Hat/Negative SEO with a twist

[Etna]

Hey everyone,

This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you.

Scenario

1. In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages;  www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to.

We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages.

2. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site.

Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them.

Next Steps?

The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are:

• Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1)
• Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795)
• Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit?

Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!

[Travis_Bailey]

I have a lot going on right now, but if you PM the domain, I can take a look in a week or so.

[GPainter]

Sounds like fun!

I did write a lovely answer which unfortunately got lost so I'll summaries a bit below-

1.  I wouldn't recommend telling Google as you might not have a penalty now but you might be temping Googles wrath

2. As you've not been marked as malware and you've removed it you should be fine but you can always try if you want to sleep better

3.Disavow proactively is a great idea Google like this approach too, It also means rather than hoping Google might ignore the links its will defiantly ignore them with the disavow list.. Further to this I've got two more options for you. you can block wildcard/dynamic pages in your Robots which will help stop Google even getting to them to find out you've got some bad links assuming you don't need the pages for your site. If you check your referring domains weekly and update the disavow list as well if you're still "under attack".

Just a quick heads up after disavowing the link you may drop down in rankings as you're removing the links however there is also a chance you can go up if you're under a algo penalty.

You can find some good tips here too - http://www.searchenginejournal.com/combat-recover-negative-seo-attack-survival-guide/114507/

Hope some of that helps and I wish I could of posted my reply but I don't have the time to rewrite it I'm afraid. Good luck to you!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? No

**Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? **

No

**Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? **

Yes

This sounds to me like you need to be thinking 'damage limitation', and by submitting a disavow now, you will be doing just this. Don't worry about the fact there are so many domains there, that is what the tool is all about. However, Penguin hasn't had a refresh in some time (12 months), so one might consider this and think that while you have time on your side to fix it, a refresh could be round the corner - so hop on it

-Andy

[JVRudnick]

Um....IQ? Did you miss the Pigeon update of a couple of months ago?

Tons of talk on same, my own fav from Mike here -

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/10/05/post-pigeon-geo-assessment-how-did-traffic-change-by-city/

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I never mentioned anything about Pigeon?