Hi Tm Blast, Cheers for the video, helps a lot. My site has recently been hit with over 200,000 of these spam search pages and a lot of them have been indexed which has caused a big decline in my traffic. I've followed along with your steps and the live test in search console shows they now have the "noindex" tag but i'm now unsure how to add a new sitemap with 12 of these spam URLS. How would I go about doing this with All in One Seo Plug in?
Hey Drew. Sorry to hear about the 200k spam search pages! Since you use All in One SEO, see if there is an option to both remove internal search pages from Google via a NOIDNEX tag + see if you can automatically stop pages being created if they pass 30 characters or something. For example, on the YOAST premium account, I can do just that. I had a similar spam attack that was going on, so I had to purchase the premium version of YOAST to block these pages via a NOIDNEX and to also automatically stop the creation of search pages that clearly spam. From there, I would update the robots.txt file to allow Google and Bing to crawl these pages. Next, go into Google Search Console and click "marked as fixed" via the pages that say Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt. That will force Google bot to crawl these pages (since the robots.txt file is updated) and they will see the noindex tag. You should start seeing a dramatic drop in these pages indexed.
@@Tmblast Cheers for the reply, much appreciated. I found the setting in All in one SEO that allowed me to set all search pages to "noindex" a few days ago and this is reflected when testing live page URL although some of these pages were crawled after they had "noindex" and still seem to be indexed. Hopefully crawled pages are unindexed on the next crawl. At the moment I don't have anything in the robots.txt file that will stop google from crawling these search page. Should I now just wait for google to recrawl all these search spam pages now assigned "noindex"? Also, is there anyway you could give an indication of how long it may take to unindex all these pages and for my traffic to return and if there is any way to speed up the process outwith a new sitemap with a few of these pages? Thanks a lot, Greg.
@@drewm812 Awesome, glad that you were able to set everything to NOINDEX. If you don't have anything blocked within the robots.txt file then you are all set. Since you have 200k spam pages to remove, it's going to take awhile. For context, it took about 2 weeks for Google to remove about 400 spam pages from my site with the steps I outlined. So for you, it could be a month or two. Regarding when traffic comes back, unfortunately, that will take awhile. I'm in a similar boat where a massive hack took place that put spam on my site. It lined up perfectly with a Google algorithm update, which means my site lost traffic. Even though the spam is cleared (plus more safety measures are put in place) it could take months for Google to review everything and put my site back on track to where it was before. Hopefully this doesn't stress you out. We are all in this together!
Hello. Thanks so much for uploading this video. My website suffers from the Internal Search Spam Attack from late September too. But now all those spammy search links are under Crawled - currently not indexed category. One of the guys in my community said he fixed the issue by reloading a clean backup and the issue went away. So my worry is something has been injected into my site to allow this attack. Would you suggest that I hire a security professional to do an audit and fix this? My hosting company said my site is clean and they can't find any malware.
Hey, sorry you are going through this attack. I recommend the following. 1) Change your CMS password 2) Change you hosting password 3) Check your hosting provider to ensure there are no accounts that have unusual access to your site 4) Add a 2-step verification on your login page 5) Consider only allowing certain IP addresses to access your login page 6) Hire an outside consultant to review your files and install a clean version with some additional protection layers. I've used this guy twice in 2023 to cleanup my website th-cam.com/video/ct5JdrwmzVQ/w-d-xo.html. I highly recommend using him. He knows this type of attack and is very transparent on what he did to protect your files
hello. Thanks for the useful information, but how can I automatically create an XML containing only spam links? I have tens of thousands of crawled links with /?s= in them. Thanks!
@junukseo2689 since the all follow the /?s= path, you don't need to worry about creating an XML if you have thousands of these pages. If these pages are indexed, you will need to do the following. 1) Perform a site:domain.com urlpath:/search/?=* in Google and Bing and document how many URL's are indexed 2) Make sure that these search pages are set to NOINDEX, FOLLOW 3) Remove the search bar on your site if you have that 4) Remove any 404 search ability if there is one. For example, some pages allow a search bar to show up on a 404 page. You will need to remove that. 5) Update your robots.txt file to have Google (and Bing) crawl this URL path. You want the bots to crawl these pages b/c they will remove them from their SEPP with the NOINDEX. I've heard from others you can set this to a 410 error instead of a 404 to speed up removal 6) Perform a site:domain.com urlpath:/search/?* in Google and Bing and document how many URL's are indexed now. There should be less (give it a week or so). 7) Google Search Console should show after a few weeks that these URL's are now removed from their index tab. If you need any additional help, you can reach me at greg@tmblast.com
Hey, you can email me at tmblast1@gmail.com so I can better understand what is going on with your site. Can't really help you without learning more about your site and situation. -Greg
Hi Tm Blast, Cheers for the video, helps a lot. My site has recently been hit with over 200,000 of these spam search pages and a lot of them have been indexed which has caused a big decline in my traffic. I've followed along with your steps and the live test in search console shows they now have the "noindex" tag but i'm now unsure how to add a new sitemap with 12 of these spam URLS. How would I go about doing this with All in One Seo Plug in?
Hey Drew. Sorry to hear about the 200k spam search pages! Since you use All in One SEO, see if there is an option to both remove internal search pages from Google via a NOIDNEX tag + see if you can automatically stop pages being created if they pass 30 characters or something. For example, on the YOAST premium account, I can do just that. I had a similar spam attack that was going on, so I had to purchase the premium version of YOAST to block these pages via a NOIDNEX and to also automatically stop the creation of search pages that clearly spam. From there, I would update the robots.txt file to allow Google and Bing to crawl these pages. Next, go into Google Search Console and click "marked as fixed" via the pages that say Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt. That will force Google bot to crawl these pages (since the robots.txt file is updated) and they will see the noindex tag. You should start seeing a dramatic drop in these pages indexed.
@@Tmblast Cheers for the reply, much appreciated. I found the setting in All in one SEO that allowed me to set all search pages to "noindex" a few days ago and this is reflected when testing live page URL although some of these pages were crawled after they had "noindex" and still seem to be indexed. Hopefully crawled pages are unindexed on the next crawl. At the moment I don't have anything in the robots.txt file that will stop google from crawling these search page. Should I now just wait for google to recrawl all these search spam pages now assigned "noindex"? Also, is there anyway you could give an indication of how long it may take to unindex all these pages and for my traffic to return and if there is any way to speed up the process outwith a new sitemap with a few of these pages? Thanks a lot, Greg.
@@drewm812 Awesome, glad that you were able to set everything to NOINDEX. If you don't have anything blocked within the robots.txt file then you are all set. Since you have 200k spam pages to remove, it's going to take awhile. For context, it took about 2 weeks for Google to remove about 400 spam pages from my site with the steps I outlined. So for you, it could be a month or two. Regarding when traffic comes back, unfortunately, that will take awhile. I'm in a similar boat where a massive hack took place that put spam on my site. It lined up perfectly with a Google algorithm update, which means my site lost traffic. Even though the spam is cleared (plus more safety measures are put in place) it could take months for Google to review everything and put my site back on track to where it was before. Hopefully this doesn't stress you out. We are all in this together!
Hello. Thanks so much for uploading this video. My website suffers from the Internal Search Spam Attack from late September too. But now all those spammy search links are under Crawled - currently not indexed category. One of the guys in my community said he fixed the issue by reloading a clean backup and the issue went away. So my worry is something has been injected into my site to allow this attack. Would you suggest that I hire a security professional to do an audit and fix this? My hosting company said my site is clean and they can't find any malware.
Hey, sorry you are going through this attack. I recommend the following. 1) Change your CMS password 2) Change you hosting password 3) Check your hosting provider to ensure there are no accounts that have unusual access to your site 4) Add a 2-step verification on your login page 5) Consider only allowing certain IP addresses to access your login page 6) Hire an outside consultant to review your files and install a clean version with some additional protection layers. I've used this guy twice in 2023 to cleanup my website th-cam.com/video/ct5JdrwmzVQ/w-d-xo.html. I highly recommend using him. He knows this type of attack and is very transparent on what he did to protect your files
hello. Thanks for the useful information, but how can I automatically create an XML containing only spam links?
I have tens of thousands of crawled links with /?s= in them. Thanks!
@junukseo2689 since the all follow the /?s= path, you don't need to worry about creating an XML if you have thousands of these pages. If these pages are indexed, you will need to do the following. 1) Perform a site:domain.com urlpath:/search/?=* in Google and Bing and document how many URL's are indexed 2) Make sure that these search pages are set to NOINDEX, FOLLOW 3) Remove the search bar on your site if you have that 4) Remove any 404 search ability if there is one. For example, some pages allow a search bar to show up on a 404 page. You will need to remove that. 5) Update your robots.txt file to have Google (and Bing) crawl this URL path. You want the bots to crawl these pages b/c they will remove them from their SEPP with the NOINDEX. I've heard from others you can set this to a 410 error instead of a 404 to speed up removal 6) Perform a site:domain.com urlpath:/search/?* in Google and Bing and document how many URL's are indexed now. There should be less (give it a week or so). 7) Google Search Console should show after a few weeks that these URL's are now removed from their index tab. If you need any additional help, you can reach me at greg@tmblast.com
it's doesn't work... i have more than 11000 pages and my new site map shows 200 pages. How google find theses pages? thank
Hey, you can email me at tmblast1@gmail.com so I can better understand what is going on with your site. Can't really help you without learning more about your site and situation. -Greg