Weird Cigarette URLs showing up in Google Webmaster Tools

[TheBatesMillStore]

Hi there,

I'm noticing a bunch of URLs showing up in my google webmaster tools that are all cigarette related (they are appearing as 404s in the crawl error report). They are throwing 404 errors which is why they are listed here...

Anyone have any idea of what this could be? I recently switched from Wordpress to Shopify and these weird URLs just started appearing on my webmaster tools in the last week. Kinda bizarre / a little alarming!

Thanks,
Bianca

[DennisSeymour]

could you post an example of the URLs you are seeing?

[CandymanKen]

Hi,

Shot in the dark here but is is possible your old site was hacked and someone was hosting some pages there without your knowledge?  You might not have seen them in WMT because they had little traffic then but now that they're 404s they are front and center.

FYI, my thought process is based on something similar that happened to me. About a year ago in my WMT I found 1000s of links from other sites. It turns out that people had made copies of the layout and graphics of my site and were putting in random text and putting them on in directories on other sites without the owners knowing. I wound up emailing dozens of site owners and had them removed - they had no idea they were there.

Just a thought.

Ken

[TheBatesMillStore]

Sure:

http://www.batesmillstore.com/winston-ultra-lights

http://www.batesmillstore.com/buy-cigarettes-online-new-york

http://www.batesmillstore.com/delaware-cigarettes-price

[TheBatesMillStore]

Maybe Ken? Another company had built and hosted the site for the company (my first project coming on board a few months ago was a new website that we'd manage in-house).

So, the odd thing based on what you were saying is that the links are being show to be coming from was: http://batesmillstore.com/shop/cable-weave-throw (which had been returning a 404 before but is not properly mapped to the right product on the new website).

Thoughts?

[DennisSeymour]

Most likely a breach to your wordpress. If it's an old, outdated version, had vulnerable plugins or the server security was brute forced.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.batesmillstore.com/*

filter with Buy or Cigar

You'll see that it has been there for a while.

Secure your website, server. Check your backlinks for cigarette links and don't worry about those 404's too much.

[TheBatesMillStore]

This I can do! Thank you for your help.

[TheBatesMillStore]

Actually - one quick question. Should I do anything in webmaster tools - mark them as fixed? Or remove the links manually? Or should I just leave the crawl errors there since they are 404s?

[DennisSeymour]

I would actually just try to mark it as fixed. 404's are not a big deal nowadays. It's just troublesome sometimes because WMT keeps bugging you about it, especially when you have links pointing to those pages.

[TheBatesMillStore]

Awesome! Thank you so much for your help. You rock!