The links might still be out in the wild / registered on google.
Have you tried doing this in google:
site:www.yoursite.com
link:www.yoursite.com
this gives you all the links google has indexed on your site and all sites that are linking to you.
To cut the spam down you can always setup a htaccess rule to forward them on if they visit one of the links or series of links e.g. path includes /spqzssysys…
You could also setup 301 redirects on the folder or each link
You also have the option to setup a robots file for the folder to no-index.
If you have not installed Wordfence i’d also suggest giving that a go, find it to be a great security plugin.
I’ve looked at Google, and all the spam links have gone now. I’ll give the Wordfence plugin a go, thanks for the recommendation.
Another problem has come up with Google Analytics, the number of visitors spiked on a couple of days when the spammers were sending traffic to my site, but the traffic now looks as if it’s stopped, which I know for a fact isn’t the case, as I’ve not had anyone telling me they’ve been unable to access it.
Here’s whats been happening with the stats: https://s5.postimg.org/uedu1znrr/google_analytics_problems.png
Well if you go rid of those links then they will redirect to your 404 which will have the GA code on it.
I expect the spam files did not have your own GA code on there… You might want to build a better picture with logs, do you have AW stats on the server?
I’ve found the AW stats, and they’re showing normal levels of traffic (apart from those two days I mentioned before). Is there any way of getting GA to ignore all the links that redirect to a 404?
Depends how you have the GA in your theme you could problematically just not include it on the 404.php.
I know in GA you can create a filter version of the profile but it only starts from the second you create the filter. e.g. it looks like the normal profile just without the 404 (or any other page) or any other criteria really.
OK, thanks for all your help 🙂
