Anchor Text - easy loans spam

[monicapopa]

Hi Moz Gurus,

I've been trying for over a year now to clean our website from a virus that hit us. This virus created internal links to these spam-  pay day loans, easy loans websites, as well as thousands of external links linking to our domain, and for a while our page redirected to another website. From thousands of links we've managed to get  it down to 300, now to 100 ( changed into 410) URL errors that still appear on google webmaster tools under crawl errors.

We had our website on Wordpress, currently we are working manually using FTP access.

Looking at Moz Open Site Explorer - 90% of the Anchor text for the Root Domain appear as : easy pay day loans etc.

How do I get rid of this? Or what is to do in this case? Does it reflect bad on the SEO that the anchor text is not matching our keywords?

Looking forward to your reply.

If you wish to look at the website: www.manvanlondon.co.uk

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Monica,

It is horrible when that happens - just to check, have you secured the site now to prevent unauthorised access?

With regards the external anchor texts, these are going to be picked up by what the MOZ crawler finds, but it won't be an instant change. The crawler will have to revisit all of these sites to see links that have changed.

Don't worry about these still being shown in MOZ - it will take time, but if you still find external links to you, just build a disavow list.

Have you noticed any drop in the SERPs?

-Andy

[monicapopa]

Hi Andy,

Thank you for your reply. It's all secure now.

We have built quite a few disavow lists since the incident, however I will do another one and take it from there.

Oh yes we definitely dropped in rankings. If we were on first page top 5 for certain keywords and top 10 for other, now we dropped significantly.

Despite this, I can see a slow increase, and I am hoping with further work we can disassociate ourselves from the spam and increase SERPs.

Monica

[Andy.Drinkwater]

That's good news on both fronts.

Just remember with the disavow file, to add to the file that is there. It's too easy to overwrite a file and reverse work you have already done.

-Andy