Site was infected with spam webmaster tools still reporting it
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I have recently been working with a site that was hacked. It suffered from a pharma injection into Joomla. The site has been cleaned for several months, but WMT is still reporting "pharmacy" as occuring 421 times. The url it gives reports a 500 error. I also removed it in Google. Can this still be hurting the site? How can I clean this up?
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Hi John,
Question: When you say WMT reports 421 instances of "pharmacy" - where do they report this? In your inbound anchor text, content keywords, or somewhere else?
Also, does Google report any malware on your site? I couldn't tell from the question.
Regardless, if you're unsure about any lingering hack, I'd use a tool like Securi to do a site check. If you're site is indeed clean, I wouldn't worry too much about the latent data in Webmaster Tools. But if you're site was infected for a long time, you can try filing a reconsideration request which might prompt a set of human Google eyeballs on the site. If you site is clean, you can also perform a "crawl as google" and submit all linked pages to the index.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
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Hi John,
I agree with Martijn. A client's website suffered from Malware infection a couple of weeks ago. As a result GWT reported a Malware infection on the site aswell as all search results on Google are marked with a note that this website is infected.
After I cleaned the website up, I went back to GWT and clicked on the error message. I marked all errors as fixed. This tells Google to check your website ASAP. Just fyi: ASAP is in this case a definition which can't be precise as it's up to Google.
Anyway, I think the reason why it takes so long for you ould be:
- You still have infected files. Make sure your website is really clean!
- Your website is clean by the crawling algorythm is very long so it takes ages until you get rid of the error message. Best solution here: Mark your errors as fixed.
Hope this makes it for you.
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Hi John,
Overall my experience is that Google Webmaster Tools is sometimes really slow with refreshing the data and mostly when your problems occurred a couple of months ago. You could try to mark the items as fixed in GWT, this sometimes makes it easier to see new errors.
Hope this helps!
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