Spam pages / content created due to hack. 404 cleanup.

[GreenStone]

A hosting company's server was hacked and one of our customer's sites was injected with 7,000+ pages of fake, bogus, promotional content.

Server was patched and spammy content removed from the server.

Reviewing Google Webmaster's Tools we have all the hacked pages showing up as 404's and have a severe drop in impressions, rank and traffic. GWT also has 'Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links'...

What do you recommend for:

1. Cleaning up 404's to spammy pages? (I am not sure redirect to home page is a right thing to do - is it?)
2. Cleaning up links that were created off site to the spam pages
3. Getting rank bank // what would you do in addition to the above?

[CommT]

You want those old spam pages to have a 410 code - gone (permanently). I'm not 100% sure how you will achieve this though... I'd speak to your hosting company and/or web developer.

404 code means the page is 'not found' which isn't the same as 410, which tells the search engines that the page has gone forever, so they won't keep looking for it.

Hope this helps!

Amelia