Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?

[usDragons]

My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html

The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links.

Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there.

The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com".

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

[iQi]

Hi there,

Seems to me that you should follow the standard process when you have unnatural links. You should:

1. Compile a list of links and domains.
2. Contact Webmasters of these domains, requesting removal of links (include the pages where these links are added in your email)
3. Save all your sent and received emails to/from Webmasters
4. Ones that don't reply to you, email them one more time a couple of weeks later
5. Create a disavow file for domains that you couldn't get links removed from, state the reason and dates of emails.
6. Submit the disavow file to the disavow tools

I know its not straight froward nor fast, but thats how you maintain the public link profile of any website since the Penguin Updates started.

I hope it helps

[GlobeRunner]

usDragons, the best way to deal with these links is to use Google's Disavow Links tool to disavow them.

First, you need to identify all of the links, and you an do that by downloading all your links from Open Site Explorer, Majestic.com, ahrefs.com, and Google Search Console. Combine the lists and remove the duplicates.

You'll want to manually review all of them, make a list of the ones you want Google to ignore, then upload a list of the domain names using Google's disavow links tool. Google has more info about their disavow tool here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

[usDragons]

Thanks. We've been through this bad link cleanup process before, but not this kind of situation. Some advice I read said Google doesn't care about those 404s because it's obviously unrelated spam, but I would think having so many crawl errors can't be healthy for the site and I don't like the idea of redirecting them to the new site.

Now the trick is we don't have control of the old site, so we can't verify it in Google Search Console. The old site is just a redirect to the current site, so there is no website to work with. Looks like the disavow tool wants you to select a website property, but we can only use the new domain name. Will the disavow tool understand that these bad links to the old domain are redirected to the new domain name?

[iQi]

Hi usDragons,

Having too many crawl errors is not healthy. Usually a few number of pages are deleted every now and then, but having hundreds or thousands of 404s means something is wrong with the website, and from your description it's obvious that something is wrong. In fact, redirecting unnatural/thin content pages to your website can harm it, as its in a way links that send traffic (through 301 redirects) to your website, so you need to disavow these.

Because you have no control over the website, you should treat it as an external site that is spamming you. So don't think of it as a site that you own but have no access to.

The disavow tool requires you to create a .TXT file that have an explanation of why you disavow each group of domains/links. So you should explain that these are bad links that send you traffic, and you tried to "request" deleting these links and you got no help from whoever controls it, which i guess is true in your case.

Try to explain everything in your comments (in the .TXT file) (See attached)

Good luck and I hope I could help in anyway.

link-disavow-file-example-1024x288.jpg

[rjonesx. 0]

Hey, this is Russ here at Moz.

Do the redirects point to the homepage or to the current URL? For example, does the http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html redirect to http://newsite.com or http://newsite.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html

If it does redirect to the same URL on newsite.com, I would try using wildcard robots.txt entries to simply block the offending content altogether. For example, if all the spam is off the styless.asp page, you could simply block styless.asp?* in your robots.txt and prevent Google from ever crawling those spammy links.

However, if you are redirecting everything to the homepage, I think you will need to go back to the old webmaster and figure something out. While Google is great at detecting spam, once you are under a penalty it can be difficult to recover. No one is perfect, including Google, and you don't want to be one of their "mistakes".