2

Last week a site I help administer was compromised. A confluence of events (move to new hosting, brand new web application released, etc.) makes it difficult to track down why it happened, but essentially an index1.php file was uploaded to the root of the site's shared hosting. We noticed a lot of spam-like traffic coming in looking like the following:

http://www.mysite.com/index1.php?Ugg=black-ugg-cardy-purple

We deleted the php script, locked down our hosting, disabled PHP (which wasn't necessary in the first place), changed all passwords and performed a thorough security review to ensure this doesn't happen in the future.

The problem

Google indexed the site subsequent to the file being uploaded and a site that should have a few hundred indexed pages now has 65K. I need to get these removed to stop visits to these spam links and did the following:

  • Updated application to return a 410 in case index1.php is requested
  • Added a disallow: /index1.php line to our robots.txt
  • Began requesting url removals from google.

Google has been crawling our site but steps 1 and 2 don't appear to have made a difference. The 3rd step (url removal) can be automated to an extent but has a daily limit of ~1000 urls and it would obviously take ~2 months to complete. To add to this, I haven't found a straightforward way to export a list of all indexed URLs and it is a manual and tedious process to actually find these URLs to begin with.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for removing these spam links?

Thank you in advance, JP

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Yes. The first item is perfect!

Updated application to return a 410 in case index1.php is requested

But the second item needs to be removed.

Added a disallow: /index1.php line to our robots.txt

This will not allow Google and Bing to know of your 410.

As for item three,

Began requesting url removals from google.

...forget it. Too much work to be practical.

The best thing you can do is wait. It will take a while, but Google only has to hit the index1.php file once to get the picture.

Often, the best remedy in most cases like this is patience.

Improve this answer
2
  • I can't believe I didn't see the conflict. I thought patience was the answer and appreciate the feedback!
    – JP01
    Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 5:44
  • @JP01 Anytime my friend! I am here every day and we have some real experts here on this site. Anything we can help with, please come back.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 5:58

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.