Hack and soft 404s

  • vicky2

    (@vicky2)


    9 years, 3 months ago

    [ Moderator note: moved to Fixing WordPress. ]

    Hi,
    I recently got a Search Console (SC) warning about soft 404s. I already had paid Wordfence installed and still do. There were a couple hundred spammy soft 404s.

    I paid a place to fix the issue. The repair place said all was well, they emptied the cache and that the soft 404s “might go away.” That day was the last day a soft 404 appeared in SC. The place installed additional security stuff. They were vague about whether the issue was from a hack.

    My host also looked at the site and said it had been hacked, but that all was OK now.

    But, since then (several days ago), the graph of crawl errors in SC has gone UP instead of down. My rankings have dropped, dramatically in some cases, during this time.

    About 30 mins. ago I marked all the soft 404 pages as fixed in SC, though they are still showing.

    So why are Crawl Errors rising? Does this issue relate to WordPress? I would like my rankings back and to not see all these soft 404s.

    What can I do? I am trying to again contact the repair place and host but I think they have done all they can. I need a more holistic view of what’s going on; running scans isn’t enough. Thanks for any help.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    The crawl error are rising because the problem pages are gone, but they’re probably still indexed or linked to somewhere, so now they’re just landing on hard 404’s rather than soft 404’s.

    It will take some time for that to change, as that portion of the problem is outside of your control.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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