Transkript:
Google definitely has a problem with spam right now. And if you don’t pay attention to this video, you may lose your rankings sooner than you think. So stay tuned. Hello and welcome! My name is Andor and I am an SEO consultant. I help companies increasing their organic visibility in organic search by improving their technical infrastructure through better strategic alignment and optimized processes. So right now in Google land, we see scrapers outranking the original content domains, and we even see situations where scrapers are referenced by Google as their chosen canonical tag within the search console. So while what’s what’s going on here? However, in the last few days we have seen a global spam issue where I think some people still do not understand that this can really affect their rankings negatively. Although Google is always saying that you don’t need to think about spam as an issue for you. This one is different. In recent days, countless reports of increasing 404 errors have been appearing in search consoles around the world. The reason is that a massive spam network is linking to all sorts of URLs, always using the same pattern at the end, which is slash 1000. After some SEOPs, including myself, have written about it and some SEO news jumped on it as well, Google communicated that it shouldn’t be a problem if everyone responds with a 404 status code on these URLs. This, of course, has come mainly down initially. And here is the problem, at least for some of you guys. Yes, it may be true that for those who do respond with a 404 status code straight away, this isn’t a problem.
But what if you don’t? Let’s hope it is the majority that uses the 404 already. And of course, you could argue that there is an indirect recommendation included, but many people simply stop thinking here. Unfortunately, hardly anyone talks about the other cases because many most quickly put the topic aside, thanks to Google’s 404 response. Until now I have had contact with nearly a dozen domain owners of which domains are not responding with the 404 including domains that are using client side rendering, by the way. So what happens if you don’t respond with a 404 status code? This unfortunately leads to a situation where firstly, these spam links are valid for you, and secondly, where URLs are being generated at your site are oftentimes classified by Google as valid URLs. By the way, if you visit the pages that Google indicates in the search console, you will be redirected through several redirects to adult spam and other unpleasant sites, so please don’t do that. The problem is that, let’s say for roughly 90% of all these domains, these spam links shouldn’t be a problem because the target URLs returns a 404 status code. Hooray! But domains that usually redirect error pages automatically to a different page on the domain, or that have a canonical tag to other URLs on this spam URLs, or that simply answer with a 200 status code. Now have a valid, oftentimes indexable subpage on their domain that gets links from spam sites.
This unpleasant case, of course, reinforces the general SEO recommendation that requests to unknown URLs should always respond with a 404 status code. And to be honest, this is the only thing you can do right now, so make sure that all these URLs, especially these /1000 URLs, receive a 404 status code. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about the spam links as an issue here. Maybe they are. Maybe they are not. I talk about the generated URLs on your domain as an issue. So frankly speaking, if this only remains with a few of those URLs, the risk may be low. And you know, but I think that everyone now understands the basic potential danger for some domains. And if you have suddenly a few thousands of these URLs on your site, well, that can impact your rankings for sure. And just to give you a little addendum and, you know, some background information, I have seen several domains already that are generating all these valid and indexable URLs with a 200 status code, as these domains oftentimes are publishing the same content on these URLs on, you know, as on other levels on the, on the domain. And Google started actually to classify all these URLs as duplicates within the search console. So maybe if you know, you have no problem if you answer with a 404 status code, let’s hope so. But if you don’t answer with a 404 status code, you may have at least one of the two following issues.
You either receive spam links from sites on scale, and you can only hope that Google will devalue them automatically as they think they are able to do that. And you receive a ton of, you know, maybe a taxable pages, presumably classified as duplicates in the search console. And just to keep in mind that there are some domains that have really valid rules in place where URLs without a trailing slash, which are now generated by the spam attack, are redirected to a version with a trailing slash at the end. So please double check that these URLs that do respond with a 404 status code as well. And I have seen these spam links now already in at least the following search console categories 404 errors, which is the only category that is okay excluded by Noindex tag pages with redirect Soft 404 alternate pages with proper canonical tag duplicate Google choose different canonical than users. So maybe some people should care more about this than just saying it is a 404 issue and no problem. It is way more. So please really make sure that you are answering all these URLs with the 404 status code. Yeah, so that’s for me. I hope you enjoyed it. So if you liked the video then please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions or comments then use the section below. Subscribe to my channel and then we’ll see us the next time. Bye bye.