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Unindexed Pages and Spam Links
Hello everyone,
SEO noob here in need of urgent help. Not even sure where to start.I’ll try to explain the situation and then state our current problem, hoping some of you can maybe shed a light on what’s happening:We are a small company selling our own Bike Helmets online and offline. We are currently searching for a new Partner for our Google Ads and had a video call with them. In this call we also analyzed a few numbers from our statistics and we saw that we have around 23 MILLION Backlinks. I don’t know which tool that was but I’m pretty sure that this is not thanks to my or any prior amazing SEO work. This already made me nervous.
Then I remembered that early this year, our website was flooded by about 300.000 asian visitors within 2 weeks. We usually don’t have any asian traffic at all, and our general monthly visitors are roughly at around 5-10k in total. Back then, I figured this was some sort of security issue from Shopify (which we use) or whatever, but didn’t think about it too much as these bots or spam visits stopped shortly after. However throughout the last few months, only shortly after the above mentioned visits happened I’ve noticed that our monthly visits have also decreased by more than 50% on average. I’ve thought this to be either a problem of not having taken care of SEO in a few years (we had a guy for that 3 years ago) or our former Google Ads Agency not doing a good job. (Also CPCs increasing etc.)
Today I’ve visited the Google Search Console for the first time (remember, I’m an SEO noob) and now I’ve become even more nervous. There are 200k 404 links, some of them “legit”, but a lot of search quiries with asian characters. Also we have 9,6 Million found but not indexed and 500k crawled but not indexed links apparently.
Now I have several questions and theories regarding all this:Question 1)
I learned that there’s a robot.txt file that tells Google which sites to crawl and which not (correct me if I’m wrong). There seems to be around 800 sites that are indexed despite being blocked through the robot file. I imagine this is not good. Why are these obvious spam links indexed even though blocked? And how can I add other sites to the robot file? Most of the unindexed pages are starting with /search but there are also a lot coming from /vendors, which should be blocked then too I guess.Question 2)
Are these 10 million unindexed sites a “good” or a bad thing? While I can imagine it’s good that they are not indexed, I’m not sure whether they still have a negative impact. Is there something that can be done?Question 3)
I’ve seen that you can ask Google to remove certain links from their search. But there’s no way that I have to manually submit 10 Million pages to them right? (Please tell me I’m right). Or can I just say please remove all links from xyz.com/search and it will get rid of all those spam links?And now my theory:
Would it be possible that these spam links all “came to life” after the visitor flooding and we are now being punished by Google for this, hence resulting in the decrease in visitors? Or could it be the other way around and this flood of visitors was created because there were all these spam links already?I really hope someone can at least give me some clues on what’s happened and what I can do to get everything back to normal as all this makes me really nervous. If you’ve read this far I already appreciate that you did.
Thank you in advance!
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1 Reply
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I don’t understand what you’re saying about the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file tells Google to ignore pages on the website it is on. Why would there be spam pages on your website? It sounds like you think robots.txt tells Google to ignore mentions of your website on other pages? Robots.txt blocking things like /search is pretty normal.
I would think you don’t have to worry about the spam links or foreign characters appearing on your search results. unless you actually have spam pages on your website, and these foreign character searches are landing on your spam pages.
If your website actually has spam pages on it, then delete them. Don’t worry about spam pages outside of your website linking to your website unless you get a Google notification on Webmaster Tools.
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