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When we bought our domain and connect Google search engine we noticed that we had about 1000 spam URLs from 2020, probably someone who used to domain as a source of back links.

We have a list of all the URLs and are returning 410 (before 404) for all of them but the URLs are not disappearing from the google-search console (they are not findable on Google though). It seems like Google is still penalising us for having them because we are not getting any new pages found.

This is a list of a couple URLs:

For example this is one of the URLs: https://examplec.com/circular/disk/feeders/15105.html

Can we somehow remove all those 1027 spam pages? Or is Google not punishing us but just being slow with indexing? Some pages are 2 months old and still not crawled.

We tried asking for removal for a couple of pages but they came back after a couple days. We tried changing 404 to 410 (gone) but no positive result and we tried adding a 'fake' sitemap for the spam URLs.

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Google does not punish your site for 404 errors - their 404 report is purely informational, and meant to notify you in case you see any URLs in the report that are not actually supposed to be 404. It's very normal for Google to be slow at indexing new websites, for less popular sites even taking several months to ramp up to where you appear consistently in search results.

For tips on how to get your site's content indexed more quickly, see this related post: Why aren't search engines indexing my content?

Additionally, 404 sitemaps are unnecessary here since you stated that the 404'd pages are already not searchable on Google, and imo 404 sitemaps can be risky business. See Mike Ciffone's answer here: Shall I submit sitemap containing all the bad (now 404) urls after the spam url hack?

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  • Thank you for this comment this was the major concern. The pages seem to dissapear slowly but the other answer said they might come back. Ill just ignore the 404's from now on :)
    – Golf van Naat
    Jan 23 at 5:23
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I am not sure there is a way to make Google "forget" those URLs. I have tried submitting to "Removals", but they are only temporary removals. They come back. I have since left them at 404.

Also, Google took 6+ months to first start showing my site content in organic search results, while I kept on adding more content. It took almost a year to start seeing any meaningful traffic.

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    To state it a bit stronger: Google never forgets about URLs. They will appear in Google Search Console forever. There is no way to remove them. Googlebot may come back and try to crawl them a decade from now. Returning a 404 or 410 for them is appropriate and the best that you can do.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jan 22 at 11:24
  • Taking 6 months to a year to getting traffic is pretty regular in my understanding unless you have a lot of backlinking.
    – Golf van Naat
    Jan 23 at 5:20
  • For the urls 10% of them are gone now but I am afraid they will come back, i read that 404's dont take away crawl credits cognitiveseo.com/blog/19933/do-404-errors-affect-seo
    – Golf van Naat
    Jan 23 at 5:21
  • Googlebot uses PageRank to determine how much crawling your site gets and even how much crawling each page gets. If you are not linking to these 404 pages (ie not passing PageRank to them), their crawling won't come at the expense of the crawl budget for the rest of your site.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jan 23 at 11:19

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