How do i deindex the bulk spammy pages from my website?

Effective Strategies for Deindexing Unwanted Spammy URLs from Your Website

If your website has recently been targeted by spam or malicious activity—such as an influx of unwanted URLs originating from specific regions—you’re likely wondering how to effectively remove these pages from search engine indexes. In particular, if you’ve migrated your site to a new hosting provider and cleared your previous data but continue to see undesirable URLs appearing in search results, it’s crucial to implement targeted deindexing strategies.

Understanding the Situation

Website attacks that generate spam links or duplicate content can severely impact your site’s SEO health and user trust. Even after removing compromised data and switching hosting providers, search engines may still crawl and index URLs from your previous site, especially if they appear in external links or have been cached.

In your case, you mentioned that your site was subject to a Japanese-origin spam attack, and despite moving to a new host and deleting old data, numerous Japanese URLs remain indexed. This indicates that search engines are still referencing the outdated URLs, which can harm your site’s reputation and SEO performance.

Step-by-Step Approach to Deindexing Unwanted URLs

1. Verify Current Indexing

Start by identifying which URLs are still indexed:

• Use Google Search Console (GSC) to fetch a list of indexed URLs.
• Conduct site-specific searches on Google with site:yourdomain.com to see which pages are appearing.

2. Remove Malicious & Spam URLs

The most effective way to deindex unwanted URLs is through a combination of technical and manual methods:

• Use the URL Removal Tool in Google Search Console:
  Submit individual URLs or a batch of URLs to be temporarily removed from search results. This is a quick fix but only provides temporary removal unless coupled with other actions.

• Implement the noindex Directive:
  Edit the HTTP headers or add a noindex meta tag to the pages you want to deindex. This signals search engines to exclude these pages from their index during crawl cycles. Since you’ve deleted the data, ensure that these pages are no longer accessible or are returning 404/410 status codes.

• Configure Robots.txt Restrictions:
  Prevent search engines from crawling spammy URLs by blocking their patterns in your robots.txt file. For example:
  User-agent: *
Disallow: /spam-directory/
Disallow: /junk-url-pattern/
  Be cautious—this prevents crawling but does