Dodgy links

[browndog]

I hired some absolute amateur to fix some issues on my site, which totally bit me, he made things worse. One of the things he has done is delete my redirect plugin, which had hundreds, if not thousands of redirects. My site is 17 years old and urls have changed as I've changed from Frontpage to joomla to WP. I cannot fathom the new Google webmaster tools, it makes no sense to me. The old version was easy to navigate, but this is like landing in a foreign-speaking country.

Anyway, long story short, I can't find broken links, but I clicked on something and it's showing my top ranking text as something seriously inappropriate. In my 17 years, I've not once asked for a link, hired SEO to link build (or do anything else for that matter), so it's nothing I've done or paid somebody else to do. All I can see is 'really inappropriate text here' is ranking number one, I can't work out what page it's linking to or how to make it go away. I click on it, and nothing happens.

I keep getting slammed by Google, despite being 100% white hat, but why am I getting dodgy links like that? How do I make them go away? I'm feeling so frustrated that I don't ever break the rules and find that kind of iffy thing.

[tangor]

Most likely it has been there all the time. I ran into the same thing not long ago and spent DAYZ going through raw logs, defining patterns and killing off the noise (which took about three months).

Even then, the bad actors continue and it is your stamina and determination to keep it to a minimum.

MEANWHILE, those same logs will also reveal what you need to put in place to do the 301s necessary to put things back on track.

Personally I never used a plug-in for something that critical for the simple reason that it might "one day" cease to work properly, or as in your case, have a nitwit delete it!

Can you not find a copy and reinstall? Just asking!

All best wishes in solving this SOONEST!

[browndog]

I’ve reinstalled the plugin, is there a manual way to redirect? I agree, it would be safer without using a plugin.

I’m gutted he removed and deleted it, with so many redirects. It is going to take a huge amount of time to fix up.

Are you meant to disavow these ‘bad’ links? Will Google think I asked for them in the first place. I don’t even know why a site like that would want to link to my site.

[lucy24]

is there a manual way to redirect?

Of course there is. And it probably makes vastly less work for the server than running everything through a CMS plugin. That’s the main reason this site has an Apache subforum. Sure, people sometimes ask advice about running their servers. But mostly it's about how to redirect abc to cba.

[not2easy]

Since this is WP, you should have a copy of the sql file either downloaded or on server backups. By any chance have you asked your host about that? Depending on how old your backup is, it could require more work to get to where you were, but ideally you have a backup with each WP version change (?).

I agree with lucy24, there are other ways to redirect besides plugins if you really can't go back to an older backup. Visit our Apache [webmasterworld.com] forum.

[browndog]

Thanks everybody, I really appreciate it. I'm better at writing content than actually doing the technical side. I will speak to the host to see what they have to say.

I vaguely remember doing redirects via cpanel many years ago, I will look in the Apache forum, am feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

I just manually disavowed 41 Russian domains.