Chinese hackers and spammy backlink pages

[zarathustra2011]

A couple of years ago, Chinese hackers got access to my FTP (I believe it to be the fault of my hosting company). For a few days they uploaded pages to advertise designer clothing. I soon spotted these new pages after a couple of days, notified the hosting company, changed all passwords and removed and deindexed the half a dozen or so new pages they added.
The problem remaining is that my most numerous backlinks (which now just go to a 404 page) and anchor phrases are all spammy clothing ones that have no relation to my website. There's thousands of them, so I do not know what action I can take (if any?) and what effect this might have on my SEO?

[Planet13]

This should NOT have any effect on your sites ranking / SEO.

I might see if I could serve a 410 error instead of a 404, but that might not even be worth the bother.

I would go ahead and disavow those backlinks though, just to be sure, even though they point to a 404 page.

BTW: If you get any TRAFFIC from those backlinks, you can always set up your 404 page so that provides helpful site navigation for anyone who comes to your site via those links (actually, ANY 404 page on ANY site should provide helpful site navigation).

[zarathustra2011]

Thanks planet13. I was initially a little taken aback when I checked my anchor cloud only to discover big fashion brand names featured prominently. I subscribed to one of the major backlink sites, and have downloaded a large list of offending backlinks (carefully checked) which has now been submitted with the disavow tool.

[Planet13]

If you just want to cover ALL of your bases...

You COULD go to the google product crawling, indexing and ranking forums and start a new thread basically outlining what you discovered, when you discovered it, and what you are doing to remedy it.

Then bookmark that thread.

Then, JUST IN CASE google imposes a MANUAL PENALTY against you (unlikely, but could happen), you could submit a reconsideration request right away pointing to that post in the google products crawling indexing ranking webforum as well as your disavow file.