404 or 503 Malware Content ?
-
Hi Folks
When it comes to malware , if I have a site that uses iframe to show content off 3rd party sites which at times gets infected. Would you recommend 404 or 503 ing those pages with the iframe till the issue is resolved ? ( I am inclined to use 503 .. )
Then take the 404/503 off and ask for a reindex ( from GWT malware section )
OR
Ask for a reindex as soon as the 404/503 goes up. ( I do understand we are asking to index as non existing page , but the malware warning gets removed )
PS : it makes sense for this business to showcase content using iframe on these special pages . I do understand these are not the best way to go about SEO.
-
Thanks Peter, apologies for the delay was tied downed with some other things. Your help is much appreciated.
-
Sorry, I realized my comments about the 503 were kind of confusing. A 503 shouldn't serve a page for visitors, either - it's just a matter of 404s sometimes seeming a little more friendly, from the user perspective. It just depends on how you're set up.
My only other concern about the 503 is that it's generally intended for short-term use (at least it's been implemented that way). It's great if your site is down for a day and basically tells Google to come back later. If you leave one up for weeks or months, though, I'm honestly not sure what will happen. It's probably going to be treated like a 404, but it also could signal to Google that you have technical problems on the site. So, it may depend on the timeframe. The problem here is that you don't control the malware - it could be weeks before the 3rd party takes action.
-
Come to think of it we don't get a lot of malware warning in GWT anymore , I am guessing that is because the framed pages are no longer indexed. ( We could have potentially got the warnings while they were still being de-indexed ?? )
I am worried about that since GWT used to warn us about these and if the pages are no longer indexed and Google no longer sends us notification , we might miss these pages with malware. I have to look in to some way of tracking this ( if you have come across any solution I would love to hear more about it ) .
Thanks a lot for your help Peter.
Serving up malware content to users was never an option. I think .. in our case it makes sense for us to go the 503 route . If anyone is wondering how we plan to handle it :
When we see a malware notification on the i-framed pages.
- We plan to disable the iframe and send a general page for visitors saying the content is temporarily disabled .
- We will send a 503 header response with this page to state that this is a temporary issue. ( for search engines )
- Ask the site owner to fix the issue .
- Once issue is resolved , remove the 503 and make the framed content live again.
This helped me make this decision : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2600719?hl=en&ref_topic=2600715&rd=1
-
So, it's not indexed, but you're still get malware warnings? That's odd. Honestly, Google shouldn't even see something in a frame as directly being part of your site, in many cases. If you 404 those pages, you potentially kill them for visitors, too - on the other hand, you probably shouldn't be sending your visitors to frames with malware. If it's just a few, I'd probably 404 them temporarily - it'll protect your rankings and your visitors. I'm honestly not sure if the 503 is going to do much that the NOINDEX isn't doing.
-
Hi Peter
The content used to be index, but I have added the noindex tag on there ( since I felt the same way about them being indexed as you did ) but we still get the GWT warning about malware from time to time. My initial concern was do I 503 or 404 the page till we fix the malware issue. I think 503 is the best way to go about it.
-
Is there any compelling reason to index this content? It's probably going to look thin to Google, at best (since it's mostly a wrapper around an outside site), and the search value is pretty minimal. In other words, it's good for your users and possibly conversion, but it doesn't have much value for search visitors. If the page is really just a wrapper around a demo site, then I'd consider using META NOINDEX on the frameset and just keep those out of your search results completely.
-
Hi Peter
Thanks for looking in to this.
We sell templates and themes for various cms and we find that it's great if we can demo the content to users before they purchase them. Our content is created by the community and most of them often add updates to existing content. We find that its best to let our authors host their own files and we link to that content through an iframe.
At times some of the author's might get hacked / or some of their advertisement gets flagged as malware. We get notified by WMT when google see an malware on these iframed pages.
-
I tend to agree with Sorina - in a perfect world, it would be great if you could somehow vet that content and make sure it stays safe for your users (even crawl the sites offline if you need to). What content does the page have around the iFrame (if you can explain it generally without giving away private details)? I'm wondering if these pages should be indexed at all, malware or no, since they're mostly just re-displays of other people's content. META NOINDEX might be a better bet here.
-
Probably you will not like my answer and you will give me the thumb down but:
Your main concern should be your visitors. You are displaying on your website content that, as you personally say, "at times" is dangerous to your visitors. Studies show the percentage of internet users that don't have any antivirus software or use outdated/expired software is somewhere around 50-60%. You should care more about your visitors and stop putting them in danger.
I don't know what content you are iframing on your website, but you should find a more trusted source that doesn't get infected at all.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tricky Duplicate Content Issue
Hi MOZ community, I'm hoping you guys can help me with this. Recently our site switched our landing pages to include a 180 item and 60 item version of each category page. They are creating duplicate content problems with the two examples below showing up as the two duplicates of the original page. http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=180&p=1 http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=60&p=1 The original page is http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts I was just going to do a rel=canonical for these two 180 item and 60 item pages to the original landing page but then I remembered that some of these landing pages have page 1, page 2, page 3 ect. I told our tech department to use rel=next and rel=prev for those pages. Is there anything else I need to be aware of when I apply the canonical tag for the two duplicate versions if they also have page 2 and page 3 with rel=next and rel=prev? Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Devaluing certain content to push better content forward
Hi all, I'm new to Moz, but hoping to learn a lot from it in hopes of growing my business. I have a pretty specific question and hope to get some feedback on how to proceed with some changes to my website. First off, I'm a landscape and travel photographer. My website is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com - you can see that the navigation quickly spreads out to different photo galleries based on location. So if a user was looking for photos from California, they would find galleries for Lake Tahoe, Big Sur, the Redwoods and San Francisco. At this point, there are probably 600-800 photos on my website. At last half of these are either older or just not quite up to par with the quality I'm starting to feel like I should produce. I've been contemplating dumbing down the galleries, and not having it break down so far. So instead of four sub-galleries of California, there would just be one California gallery. In some cases, where there are lots of good images in a location, I would probably keep the sub-galleries, but only if there were dozens of images to work with. In the description of each photo, the exact location is already mentioned, so I'm not sure there's a huge need for these sub-galleries except where there's still tons of good photos to work with. I've been contemplating building a sort of search archive. Where the best of my photos would live in the main galleries, and if a user didn't find what they were looking for, they could go and search the archives for older photos. That way they're still around for licensing purposes, etc. while the best of the best are pushed to the front for those buying fine art prints, etc. These pages for these search archives would probably need to be de-valued somehow, so that the main galleries would be more important SEO-wise. So for the California galleries, four sub-galleries of perhaps 10 images each would become one main California gallery with perhaps 15 images. The other 25 images would be thrown in the search archive and could be searched by keyword. The question I have - does this sound like a good plan, or will I really be killing my site when it comes to SEO by making such a large change? My end goal would be to push my better content to the front, while scaling back a lot of the excess. Hopefully I explained this question well. If not, I can try to elaborate further! Thanks, Mickey
Technical SEO | | msphotography0 -
Soft 404 errors
Hello Everyone, I recently removed some pages and made a custom 404 page by putting "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.site.com/404.htm" in the htaccess file but WMT now reports soft 404 errors, how do I do this properly? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Unfindable 404's
So I have noticed that my site has some really strange 404's that are only being linked to from internal links from the site.
Technical SEO | | Adamshowbiz
When I go to the pages that Web master tools suggests I can't actaully find the link which is pointing to the 404. In that instance what do you do? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂0 -
Are 404 Errors a bad thing?
Good Morning... I am trying to clean up my e-commerce site and i created a lot of new categories for my parts... I've made the old category pages (which have had their content removed) "hidden" to anyone who visits the site and starts browsing. The only way you could get to those "hidden" pages is either by knowing the URLS that I used to use or if for some reason one of them is spidering in Google. Since I'm trying to clean up the site and get rid of any duplicate content issues, would i be better served by adding those "hidden" pages that don't have much or any content to the Robots.txt file or should i just De-activate them so now even if you type the old URL you will get a 404 page... In this case, are 404 pages bad? You're typically not going to find those pages in the SERPS so the only way you'd land on these 404 pages is to know the old url i was using that has been disabled. Please let me know if you guys think i should be 404'ing them or adding them to Robots.txt Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
404 not working?
Apologies - not strictly a search question, although I am concerned that it may be negatively impacting my sites. If I enter an invalid URL - the "page not found 404 error" doesn't seem to be working. I can enter http://www.%sitename%/index.php/randomnamemadeup/ and it displays the homepage (albeit with a broken CSS). I can't fathom it out - any help appreciated. Thanks, David
Technical SEO | | newstd1000 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0