Large number of backlinks that yield 404 and do not show up in webmaster tools

Question

I ran an ahrefs.com report of one of my sites and noticed it has 2.6k backlinks, all with anchor phrases involving prescription pills which is not what the site is focused on. I know that if you get blasted with backlinks you have to manually disavow links. In this case I go to Google webmaster tools and notice that none of the 2.6k backlinks are showing up but we have 575 crawl errors all pages involving prescription pills that never existed.

I can't figure out why none of the backlinks are showing in Google webmaster or how to prevent all the fake pages from registering as 404's when they never existed in the first place.

Answer 1

What you can do with nasty 404's is turn them into 410's and then they will fall off of google's records faster than closetnoc anticipates. (ok, maybe not that fast, but at least acceptably fast).

If apache is the server that helps process your webpages and you have mod_rewrite installed, then in the document root, create an .htaccess file with the following contents:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^the-bad-link$ - [R=410,L]

Just replace "the-bad-link" with all the URLs google complains about receiving error 404 from. If it's too many URLs, then look for a pattern in all the URLs and create a regex (regular expression) out of it. For example, if every single URL starts with "enlargement" and has anything else in it and then ends with "pill" or if the url is "enlargementpill" then add the following in your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^enlargement(.*)pill$ - [R=410,L]

I think with RewriteRule you can replace "R=410" with a "G", but I'd keep with "R=410" to indicate the result status is a 410 which means gone.