Need help with those darn chinese spammers

[SunnyLeon]

So I just noticed that the index area of the google console for one of my websites just got 17.000 new indexed pages. These are searches made on the website with chinese characters. Now, of course, my search page is tagged noindex and nofollow for the whole website, so none of the links can actually index. Also, when going for live tests on any of these links, it says the links are not indexed because they are blocked by robots.txt.

My question is: Would you spend any time debugging this and submitting any removal requests or just ignore the indexing issue? None of the pages actually show on google, checked it manually. Website isn't hacked, I have scanned it. So all that this does is inflate my indexed area in google search console.

 

[SunnyLeon]

I`m bumping this because you guys are really giving me the silent treatment

 

[strontium]

what are the spammers trying to achieve with these searches?

 

[636173696e6f]

Its link injection or an attempt to do so.

If I was having this issue, I would throttle the search page all the way down to 1 search per hour per IP and see what happens.

 

[SunnyLeon]

Amazingly enough I did find one search query that managed to slip into the search engine and can be found on google even though in search console it says "not in index, blocked by robots.txt". This means that enough spam, and I might have a real problem with a lot of indexed spam search queries. I don't save search queries anywhere so it's due to purely spam backlinking to a non-existing link. This is actually fascinating. While people struggle to get some links indexed, these spammers manage to rank pages that aren't real. Any way around it so I don`t have to disable the search?

 

[irivi]

If I understand correctly what you are referring to, perhaps this will help:

sistrix.com/ask-sistrix/google-index-google-bot-crawler/why-does-a-url-that-is-blocked-through-robots-txt-show-up-in-the-search-results/

 

[SunnyLeon]

I have found this page myself actually.. what i did was disable the search completely, so now every search query goes back to homepage. I also removed the crawler Block from robots.txt so google can see the redirect. This is not permanent, but something i will keep for now so these spams can be removed from serps

If I understand correctly what you are referring to, perhaps this will help:

sistrix.com/ask-sistrix/google-index-google-bot-crawler/why-does-a-url-that-is-blocked-through-robots-txt-show-up-in-the-search-results/

 

[Elvlin]

I have found this page myself actually.. what i did was disable the search completely, so now every search query goes back to homepage. I also removed the crawler Block from robots.txt so google can see the redirect. This is not permanent, but something i will keep for now so these spams can be removed from serps

seeem you found the solution. btw do you found how the spammer can index his link ?
now when most is struggling with indexing , he/she can index to spam lol

 

[SunnyLeon]

seeem you found the solution. btw do you found how the spammer can index his link ?
now when most is struggling with indexing , he/she can index to spam lol

My thoughts on this is that they simply rely on spam. They send thousands of links to specific queries they create. I noticed the problem when i saw 17000 new pages within a week on a website that is over 10 years old with just 4000 or so content pages. They have a rather unusual keyword that isn’t in chinese and they just google that phrase until they find It in serps. And each query was Linked from another low quality domain. Out of 17.000, 2 have gotten into the serps from what i can gather. And those two because my website is an authority and articles usually get indexed within a few hours. You can probably use this on authority websites but the query isn’t redirecting to anything so the best you can do is write a message that would be seen in serps.

 

[Elvlin]

My thoughts on this is that they simply rely on spam. They send thousands of links to specific queries they create. I noticed the problem when i saw 17000 new pages within a week on a website that is over 10 years old with just 4000 or so content pages. They have a rather unusual keyword that isn’t in chinese and they just google that phrase until they find It in serps. And each query was Linked from another low quality domain. Out of 17.000, 2 have gotten into the serps from what i can gather. And those two because my website is an authority and articles usually get indexed within a few hours. You can probably use this on authority websites but the query isn’t redirecting to anything so the best you can do is write a message that would be seen in serps.

i see they put out real effor to spam your site. hmm maybe it's for testing

 

[SunnyLeon]

i see they put out real effor to spam your site. hmm maybe it's for testing

It`s not just my site. I searched for the tag they used in the links and found quite a few infected websites. us.puma.com is among the most popular. I don`t know if I even have to stress that much, but I hate to have the serps full of low content pages with low value content in a different language than the language of my website. It seems that it could hurt me in the long run

 

[terrycody]

I guess those are "Japanese gibberish hack" ?

 

[SunnyLeon]

I guess those are "Japanese gibberish hack" ?

Well doesn't a hack mean that something was actually hacked? Nothing on the website has been hacked, just gibberish added throught the search's normal function.
EDIT: I have read up a little on the Japanese gibberish hack and no, it`s nothing like this. My ranking URLs have not been tampered with, nothing has been added or removed from the website, only new pages have been indexed through the search function, that doesn't return a link but written text. This in itself shouldn't be dangerous up to a point, but it could really damage the reputation of the website in the long run

 

[terrycody]

I found more reading materials for you:

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/s...sn-t-aware-of-this-tactic-until-today.1435166http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/

 

[SunnyLeon]

I found more reading materials for you:

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/s...sn-t-aware-of-this-tactic-until-today.1435166http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/

Thank you, went through this and I`m happy other people are going through this and finding solutions. I already had both noindex on the sarch page and a block in robots.txt. The problem is that the block in robots.txt stopped google from seeing the noindex tag, so this is why the links got indexed. I disabled search for now and all searches send a 404 code. As soon as they are getting cleared out of the index, I`ll reenable the search page with the noindex tag and no robots.txt mention. While searching for tags the spammers used on my website, I found a couple of big names that also have this issue. I will contact them all and tell them about their search results and help them fix this issue if they want. Who knows? Maybe I can find some people to network with in the process.

 

[terrycody]

Thank you, went through this and I`m happy other people are going through this and finding solutions. I already had both noindex on the sarch page and a block in robots.txt. The problem is that the block in robots.txt stopped google from seeing the noindex tag, so this is why the links got indexed. I disabled search for now and all searches send a 404 code. As soon as they are getting cleared out of the index, I`ll reenable the search page with the noindex tag and no robots.txt mention. While searching for tags the spammers used on my website, I found a couple of big names that also have this issue. I will contact them all and tell them about their search results and help them fix this issue if they want. Who knows? Maybe I can find some people to network with in the process.

I am not expert on this topic to be honest, but I found that most those spammer are from Korean or Japanese, very annoying fxxkers. If Yoast SEO plugin now block internal search result now as it says, I think now those infected sites are all not wordpress sites?

 

[SunnyLeon]

I am not expert on this topic to be honest, but I found that most those spammer are from Korean or Japanese, very annoying fxxkers. If Yoast SEO plugin now block internal search result now as it says, I think now those infected sites are all not wordpress sites?

Not everyone uses Yoast. I for one, don't. And I don't think simply tagging the page as noindex fixes the issue. I already have this tag. The problem is a little more complex than this and it has to do with Google indexing links that it shouldn't. They have a clear rule to follow but they ignore it.

 

[KK123456]

Hi, I'm having the same issue. I got more than 40k links to one of my sites. I'm reading two of Yoast's articles, and it's confusing. They said it is not impacting the SEO, but they also said it impacts the craw budget bla bla bla....

I'm using Yoast. Now I decide to disable search by using this plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-search).

What else should I do? I want to add nofollow in robots.txt, but I dont really know how.

 

[SunnyLeon]

Hi, I'm having the same issue. I got more than 40k links to one of my sites. I'm reading two of Yoast's articles, and it's confusing. They said it is not impacting the SEO, but they also said it impacts the craw budget bla bla bla....

I'm using Yoast. Now I decide to disable search by using this plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-search).

What else should I do? I want to add nofollow in robots.txt, but I dont really know how.

There is no page to give nofollow tag to because search is disabled. Leave It disabled for now until things settle down

 

[KK123456]

There is no page to give nofollow tag to because search is disabled. Leave It disabled for now until things settle down

Thank you for your response. I have another question, what about the current links? They appear in both "Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag" and "Crawled - currently not indexed" in GSC.