How To Cleanup the Google Index After a Website Has Been HACKED
-
We have a client whose website was hacked, and some troll created thousands of viagra pages, which were all indexed by Google. See the screenshot for an example. The site has been cleaned up completely, but I wanted to know if anyone can weigh in on how we can cleanup the Google index. Are there extra steps we should take? So far we have gone into webmaster tools and submitted a new site map.
^802D799E5372F02797BE19290D8987F3E248DCA6656F8D9BF6^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr.png
-
As has been suggested you can request the removal of pages in GWMT and you should keep any wordpress site and plugins up to date.
To add to this, you might want to look at something like Cloudflare as an extra layer to protect your clients site. We've been using it for a year now and its made a massive difference, both to performance and security.
-
Doesn't have to be so tedious. If you have a list of URLs you can use the bulk removal extension for Chrome found here: https://github.com/noitcudni/google-webmaster-tools-bulk-url-removal
-
If you submitted a new sitemap then you should be fine, but "in case of emergency", you can try listing the individual URL's in Google Webmaster Tools > Google Index > Remove URL's. It's a tedious process, but something else you can try.
Sucks, doesn't it? Wordfence or another WP security plugin is well worth the time to install and monitor. Good luck.
-
Hi,
Just to let you know it's quite easy to find the domain of the site in question from the screenshot you provided
I think as you've created a new sitemap and submitted it to Google and removed all the pages so they return 404s, you should be fine. The page will just drop out of the index in time. You might also want to add the address of your XML sitemap to your robots.txt file as it's not there at present.
I crawled the site using Screaming Frog and couldn't see any dodgy looking pages remaining. You could create removal requests of the pages in Webmaster Tools if you'd like to take an extra step. Do this under Google Index > Remove URLs. To prevent this happening again, make sure you keep your WordPress installation and all plugins up to date.
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
-
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
Why can't google mobile friendly test access my website?
getting the following error when trying to use google mobile friendly tool: "page cannot be reached. This could be because the page is unavailable or blocked by robots.txt" I don't have anything blocked by robots.txt or robots tag. i also manage to render my pages on google search console's fetch and render....so what can be the reason that the tool can't access my website? Also...the mobile usability report on the search console works but reports very little, and the google speed test also doesnt work... Any ideas to what is the reason and how to fix this? LEARN MOREDetailsUser agentGooglebot smartphone
Technical SEO | | Nadav_W0 -
My PR1 website with no manual action is not appearing in the google top 200 result, it used to be top 1
Hi All, My website has 5 years of history, it used to be top 3 for its keyword with an SEO firm I hired back then with PR3. After 2013, its ranking starts dropping to not appearing at all in the google search result. But my site is not banned. There are still some long tail google traffic. There is no manual action in the webmaster tool. Even today, it still has PR1 but it is still not appearing in the top 200 results of google. My onsite optimization for the main keyword is good. It's just not appearing in google results at all. I manually reviewed all the top 200 results, there are so many spammy blogs were listed but not my legit website homepage with unique content. I do regret hiring that SEO firm now. But there is no manual action to my site according to google so I don't know if I should disavow all the old backlinks. I started to do some quality SEO works myself now. My ranking is now at around 11~15 in Yahoo/Bing from 30~40. Do I see some light at the end of the tunnel? Does that mean my site may appear in google again? Thank you all for the reply.
Technical SEO | | ChelseaP0 -
Will you get more 'google juice' if your social links are in your websites header, rather than its footer?
Hi team, I'm in the process of making some aesthetic changes to my website. Its getting quite cluttered so the main purpose is to clean up its look. I currently have 3x social links in the header, right at the top, and i would really like to move these to the footer to remove some clutter in the header. My concern is that moving them may have an impact on the domains ranking in google. Website: www.mountainjade.co.nz We've made some huge gains against our competitors over the past 6 months and I don't want to jeopardise that. Any help would be much appreciated as i'm self taught in SEO and have learnt through making mistakes. This time however, with Moz, i'd rather get some advice before I make any decisions! Thanks is advance, Jake S
Technical SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
Indexing Issue
Hi, I am working on www.stjohnswaydentalpractice.co.uk Google only seems to be indexing two of the pages when i search site:www.stjohnswaydentalpractice.co.uk I have added the site to webmaster tools and created a new sitemap which is showing that it has only submitted two of the pages. Can anyone shed any light for why these pages are not being indexed? Thanks Faye
Technical SEO | | dentaldesign0 -
Any one worked on a sites.google.com/ website ?
Hi I have a client that has a sites.google.com/ website, Has anyone ever used one ? or had to do SEO on one ? Any help would be very much appreciated Thanks
Technical SEO | | tempowebdesign0 -
Website Speed
What are the top 10 ways to reduce page loading times and speed up a website?
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Google plus
With a single Google search, you can see regular search results, along with all sorts of results that are tailored to you -- pages shared with you by your friends, Google+ posts from people you know. **Does pages shared by friends ** Does this mean pages shared by friends on Google plus ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050