Cleaning up after spam injection - 505 redirects

Publishing help SEO
1

Hi. About 3 or so weeks ago I redesigned my site on the webflow platform. You can see it here:

Prior to this, I had a wordpress site that had gotten hacked and filled with a ton of injection spam.

My understanding is that now that I’ve redesigned my site, google will de-index all those old spam pages that give 404 errors.

Thats all well and good, but the issue I’m having is that a lot of that spam is not returning 404s in webflow, rather its returning 505 response code craw errors.

Why is this? Here is one example:
http://studio35design.com/inc/denver%20broncos%201997%20super%20bowl%20roster-43847.html

Why isn’t this old page giving a 404 error?

I can see in the search console crawl error section that there’s a whole directory “inc” that is returning 505 errors. My concern is that google will not de-index them from my webmasters account and that they can hurt my SEO efforts.

Can someone speak into this?

2

I suggest you set up redirects in your site dashboard hosting tab.

Here’s one to get you started with your page you mentioned above:

/inc/(.*) => /.

3

Ok, but there are two issues with that solution.

  1. The links should be 404s, in order for them to die and be removed from the index. For some reason, they are not 404ing even though they are dead.
  2. There are thousands of spam links. It wouldn’t be practical to add a redirect for each one.