Google De-indexed my whole site because of Spammy URL links

peterstec

I suddenly have nearly 2000 pages that are not indexed on my site, and they're all spam. I've posted one example of about 1900 of them. I don't know where they came from or why they are on my site. Did I get hacked? Google has de-indexed me after I was at the top of many search queries. Many of the URLs refer to EZOIC using copy like "ezoicbanger" and "adsmanager", etc.

Mohammad2306

Thanks for reaching out. It's unfortunate that your site lost traffic but it's not due to this type of URL.

To address your first point, your whole site was not de-indexed by Google. You can verify this by searching Google with the site parameter as the search term, for example site:yoursite.com. There are plenty of search results, which indicates your site is still indexed by Google.

As for the URL you flagged, there are tracking scripts used for ads but they don't cause Google to de-index your site and are safe to ignore. Otherwise all sites using Ezoic for ads would be de-indexed and evidently that's not the case. There are tens of thousands of sites working just fine and growing traffic. If you prefer for Google to just ignore these URLs directly, you can simply update your robots.txt file.

More details: https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/common-google-search-console-errors-with-ezoic -> Do you want this URL to appear on Google?

peterstec

Hey Mohammad. Thank you for your feedback. I'm not an expert, but after some research online, it appears that others with the same problem have told me it's the work of a hacker. Is it normal to have zero un-indexed pages last year, to over 1850 spam pages not indexed? There are over 600 pages with "humix/video" in the URL which lead to file not found errors that were not there last year (https://ruggedoutdoorsguide.com/humix/video/ndzTHqbjbOf) and WPX hosting has told me to reach out to Ezoic to confirm issues. Here's their message:

"Back on the Ezoic topic, since their service provides SEO tools, you may consider also contacting them regardless if there are other links with their service footprint. The reason for this suggestion is that they could have more information or could provide a possible fix to the issue, since the SEO of a website is in their field of expertise."

Something VERY strange is happening since we were on page one of Google for lots of posts on our site and had 500-1000 visitors a day ... now down to 1 - 2 visitors per day. We haven't done anything other than add more articles to our site. All bad URLs (404 and others) have an Ezoic footprint. Is there a way you can confirm for sure that Ezoic has nothing to do with anything weird on my site? Could it have been hacked?

I'll read through the info you sent and hope that will offer at least a part of a solution as to why none of my posts appear in any search at all on Google.

Charlie

peterstec
For our own insight, can you share where you believe this is the work of a hacker? Has your traffic also decreased? This sounds like your site got hit by Googles Core update from the month of March as the entire site did not get de-indexed. I too see results in Google for site:yoursite.com.

Do you want all of these URLs to be indexed by Google? Editing your robots.txt file will not result in a break of function of our products but rather block Google from crawling those pages - https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/common-google-search-console-errors-with-ezoic

peterstec

One last quick thing you might be able to help with; I noticed in Search Console that 510 pages were indexed on my site, and as of March 28, only 290 are indexed. Are you saying that the 1800+ non-indexed pages do not affect the indexing process? If that's the case, is there an easy fix to getting my un-indexed pages indexed again? (like re-submitting a site map?). Any specific help on this would be great and I'll just go ahead and follow instructions. Thanks again.