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
-
Get List Of All Indexed Google Pages
I know how to run site:domain.com but I am looking for software that will put these results into a list and return server status (200, 404, etc). Anyone have any tips?
Technical SEO | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
No Index PDFs
Our products have about 4 PDFs a piece, which really inflates our indexed pages. I was wondering if I could add REL=No Index to the PDF's URL? All of the files are on a file server, so they are embedded with links on our product pages. I know I could add a No Follow attribute, but I was wondering if any one knew if the No Index would work the same or if that is even possible. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MonicaOConnor0 -
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 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Supplementary Index
Hi - Is there a way of checking whether pages are in the supplementary index? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Sitemap coming up in Google's index?
I apologize if this question's answer is glaringly obvious, but I was using Google to view all the pages it has indexed of our site--by searching for our company and then clicking the link that says to display more results for the site. On page three, it has the sitemap indexed as if it wee just another page of our site. <cite>www.stadriemblems.com/sitemap.xml</cite> Is this supposed to happen?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0