Index bloating issue

[Saison]

Hello,

In the last month, I noticed a huge spike in the number of pages indexed on my site, which I think is impacting my SEO quality score.

While I've only have about 90 pages on my site map, the number of pages indexed jumped to 446, with about 536 pages being blocked by robots.  At first we thought this might be due to duplicate product pages showing up in different categories on my site, but we added something to our robot.txt file to not index those pages.  But the number has not gone down.  I've tried to consult with our hosting vendor, but no one seems to be concerned or have any idea why there was such a big jump in the last month.

Any insights or pointers would be so greatly appreciated, so that I can fix/improve my SEO as quickly as possible!

Thanks!

[Toddfoster]

Hello Julie,

This sounds like you might have a hacking issue on your website. You probably need someone to conduct a full code audit of your site to determine whether any files you have uploaded (plugins, for example) were contaminated. If a site is hacked, new pages can be added that are hidden from view and difficult to detect unless handled by a security specialist.

We recently brought on a new client who had this issue and discovered that his site had 1000's of pages dedicated to testosterone pills, etc. We had to go through GWT and the site logs to determine what new pages were created and it was a complete hack job.

In terms of fixing your SEO, the first step is to determine where/if the hack exists. Once that is decided, you have to clean up the site and restore the site's security.

I would be happy to help you with the next steps if you would like. I am always available!

Thanks and best of luck,

Rob

[Linda-Vassily]

What do you see if you do a search for site:yoursite.com ?

[Saison]

When I do the search for my main url - the results are clean.  Just the pages to my site show up.  And the index results for this site still bloated.  However, for my wordpress site, which is a subdomain and on a different platform to my main site, there are some issues (it was hacked as Rob noted below).  But we have since cleaned up the pages etc, reuploaded the site maps, etc.  So I'm a little stumped on my main site (which wasn't hacked - that I'm aware of).

[GreenStone]

A couple of things to note:

• As Robert mentioned, I would definitely make sure there is no longer an issue on your wordpress site relating to your previous hack.
• Robots.txt disallow does not stop pages from being indexed. It merely tells search engines to stop crawling that page from here out. The meta noindex tag is more applicable for noindexing pages that are already out there.
• I would check your search console crawl errors to see if there's a hefty spike in 404 errors as well, as it may be old spam pages you removed from the site.
• If these pages that are bloating your index are all still old spam filled pages from when you were hacked, you could start by using the search console's "remove url's" tool, which will remove all these url's from the index temporarily. For a more long term approach, instead of them giving off a 404 if they have been removed, making the server give off a "410" response would tell google they are gone forever, and thus they will be removed from the index as time goes on.

[Saison]

Thank you.  These are helpful suggestions.

[BlueprintMarketing]

in order to determine if your website is hacked this is one of the best tools I know of both to find out and to remove the malware.

https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/

In order to determine rather not you have on-site SEO problems on a very technical and granular scale I would use

https://www.deepcrawl.com/ $80 a month you cannot go wrong

another amazing tool and it's free for the first 500 pages and if you want the added features which you do or more pages only about $150 a year is

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/