Indexing Japanese links after hack

Question

A few months ago our website got hacked, similar to what seems to be described in the following - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/hacked/docs/fixing_the_japanese_keyword_hack

We fixed the original part of it, by clearing the website itself so we no longer display Japanese hoodie sale pages. I have also run a Wordfence scan which has come up saying the website is clean.

Currently, the issue we are having is that multiple 3rd party domains are still continuously generating links to our domain on their site and Google is indexing them e.g.

• justaccounts.com/bumper23075
• justaccounts.com/miraculously_G7nOG7nrnO.
• justaccounts.com/iterate_JeIEbNG0.

(I got these links by going to site:justaccounts.com)

All of these generated links are throwing 404 errors because the path now does not exist. This is causing us to have an extremely high bounce rate as most of our traffic now comes from Japan and surrounding countries to these dead links, and are immediately leaving because the page doesn't exist. This is, in turn, causing us to drop in search rankings massively.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can properly tackle this issue and have it sorted once and for all? Stopping these 3rd party link generations and having our domain show as clean and only displaying URL's submitted in our sitemap?

The steps have been followed to remove the 'This site may be hacked' message and I have also run a 'Wordfence' scan which is showing that the site itself is clean and secured, so the main issue is the 3rd party generated links.

Any help on this subject would be greatly appreciated as it is becoming a serious issue in terms of us utilizing our website properly.

Answer 1

In theory, these links should no longer be harming your site. In recent updates, Google has stated that bad/spammy links simply add 'no value' rather than incurring a penalty.

However, they still maintain a disavow tool that allows you to request that links are removed for consideration.

Get a list of these links, and load them into the tool. If your rank improves then consider disavowing whole domains rather than individual links in order to reduce the amount of work you need to do.