Apologies if I’m posting this in the wrong forum - I can’t work out which category it belongs in!
One of my sites was hacked a couple of months back, and by the time I realised, Google had already indexed the spurious links. I cleaned up the site and submitted a reconsideration request to Google, and on 24th June, they confirmed that the site was now OK.
In Google Webmaster Tools, the site now shows 232 of the bogus links as “404 Not Found”, which is fine, and one listed as “Unreachable - DNS issue”, which I don’t understand. It shows as “detected 22nd July”, and the list was updated yesterday (23rd August). Does that mean it’s still classed as “unreachable” after a month? It’s not included anywhere in the “404 Not Found” list.
Why is this link showing differently to the others, is it anything to worry about and do I need to do anything about it?
Thanks Jeff. I think I may not have explained my problem very well.
I posted here because it was related to Google’s Webmaster Tools, rather than because I was concerned about SEO. (I did say I couldn’t work out where the question belonged!) The spurious links were not to external domains, but to pages apparently added to my domain by a hacker e.g. mydomain/some-pornographic-content. After I’d eliminated the hacked directory, I did expect these to start showing as 404s, and I was concerned by the one that was showing up differently, in case there was somehow still a “bad” page on my site. I didn’t see how there could be, but I like to understand what’s happening with my sites and messages I don’t understand alarm me!
It sounds like you ended up at the correct solution on your own, but I thought that I would elaborate a bit for you.
As you posted this in the SEO forum, I’m assuming that your bit of concern was how your rankings would be affected (negatively) based on the numerous 404 errors your website was producing. As long as your content was online, the answer is negligible.
Google likes for your website pages to be well linked with the rest of the web, but having bad outbound links on your page isn’t going to hurt you. The reason is control. You, as a webmaster, simply don’t have control over the other server. If you place an outbound link in good faith, then your own page can’t be penalized for it. I say “good faith” because there are obvious and not so obvious spamming techniques with outbound links that aren’t appreciated in the eyes of Google. Your particular situation doesn’t sound like something that would trip the content spam alarm.
The more often Google crawls your website, the faster your issue is likely to be fixed. That being said, as long as your content is online and you are not participating in content spam, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
I am using web master tool since years for my site. Since the beginning I can see same like this unreachable ( not DNS) issue and after some period it became OK . And recently Unreachable - DNS issue for one link, even in the sitemap also. I click on the links directly from webmaster tool error list its open without any issue. So I am hoping this to be OK automatically and this issue may be from Google bot… this issue from a week and many time updated in the webmaster tool but still the issue exist. So need to worry much if the links missing link works