Redirect

[Charlie88]

Hi,

I have a problem with one site. last year a hacked website. Several thousand links were generated there, which were in the directory https://example.com/de/. All were directed to 410. In addition, the structure of the page has been changed and currently contains several hundred 404 errors + over 500 non-existent addresses directed to the main page. Is it a good solution to redirect these addresses to similar subpages + remove redirects from the main page? The website has dropped significantly in search results. Is locking the / de / password directory a good solution? Is it better to leave 410?

[edited by: engine at 9:21 am (utc) on Feb 25, 2020]
[edit reason] please use example.com [/edit]

[lammert]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Charlie88!

The 410 response should do a pretty good job signaling the search engines that the content is permanently gone. It may take several weeks to several months to fully recover from such an incident, dependent on the crawl rate of the bots on your site.

Are the 404 responses for pages that were legit in the past, or were they URLs caused by the hacking? In the latter case, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole and 410 is the only good solution. If these were legit URLs in the past, you may want to redirect them with a 301 redirect to pages with similar content. Redirecting them all to the main page may be risky, especially with the history of the domain with hacked links. The search engines may mark it as page rank hoarding.

[lucy24]

All were directed to 410.

Please say you meant that they received a 410 response. “Directed to” makes it sound as if they were redirected to a 410 page.

non-existent addresses directed to the main page

Please don't do this, regardless of circumstances. It creates a terrible user experience, because we have no way of knowing whether we simply misspelled something, or maybe we clicked a link that accidentally included the following punctuation mark, which can easily happen. (I’ve seen it in auto-generated links from this very forum :)) And then your human user has no way to figure out what the correct URL might be, if in fact it even exists.