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Notified by Google w/ flood of 404's due to the URL rewrite exploit, what should I do?

This is a discussion on Notified by Google w/ flood of 404's due to the URL rewrite exploit, what should I do? within the General Discussion forums, part of the vBSEO SEO Plugin category; This is scary - site has been up for years and out of all the thousands of pages, I've never ...

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    MTD
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    Question Notified by Google w/ flood of 404's due to the URL rewrite exploit, what should I do?

    This is scary - site has been up for years and out of all the thousands of pages, I've never had more than five 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (and those were cause by people incorrectly linking). When the URL rewrite exploit happened at the end of the month, in the short few hours of it Google crawled thousands of pages in the re-written form (/category-name/9393.html, where 9393 is a post number). It did this for thousands of pages. At the same time, I got the 404 errors for thousands of the original pages which were no longer found due to the rewrite. To make matters worse, Google stopped crawling the pages since the incident (keep in mind these inner pages used to be crawled around every 24 to 72 hours, max) so it doesn't even realize that the old URL structure is back to being intact (it thinks the pages are still missing). Advice?

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    vBSEO Staff Brian Cummiskey's Avatar
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    Webmaster tools is not real time. Its on a delay, anywhere from 1-10 days. The dead pages should correctly 404. There is nothing for you to do ar this point but wait it out.

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    MTD
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    I know Webmaster Tools is on a delay but I guess my biggest concern is that Google decided to stop crawling the correct pages since the incident. Previously they would crawl them once every 1 to 3 days, max. I'm worried about G's next SERP updates which are usually around the beginning of the week.

    I would like to mention to anyone reading this that Brian and the vBSEO team did do an excellent and prompt job handling the exploit once it was discovered. I was on vacation at the time and Brian helped me correct the URL rewrite settings as soon as I discovered it.

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    vBSEO Staff Marco Mamdouh's Avatar
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    Don't worry at all Mike, No one know the "exact" time that Google will update your pages, In some forums it takes 2 days another one take 1 week ..... etc
    And Thanks for your kind words Mike

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