Site was infected with spam webmaster tools still reporting it
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Site dropped from SERP
Hello, I've been ranking a site for the last 5 months with good success, ranking on the first page for a high traffic keyword. In the beginning of September however, my site completely dropped out of the SERPs for several of those keywords yet my site was still indexed and there was no penalty applied to my site via search console. I would assume this maybe because of the update during the time.My site came back again a week later and it was ranking much higher on the first page (#2). Today, I just checked the SERPs and my site is now gone again. It was there this morning but now as of two hours ago it is gone, as well as one of my main competitors. My site is still indexed and no penalties via search console. Does anyone know what causes these types of issues? Im assuming my site will come back in a week or so with hopefully the same or better ranking, but when I have disruptions like this it really hurts my organic traffic. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
Should I consider webmaster tools links and linked pages ratio to remove unnatural links?
I don't know this is a suitable place for post this question. Anyway I have done it. According to the Google webmaster tools, Links to your site page. My blog has considerable amount of links, from linked pages (from certain domain names). For an instance please refer following screenshot. When I am removing unnatural links, should I consider these, links from linked pages ratio? Almost all of these sites are social bookmarking sites. When I publish a new bookmark on those sites, they automatically add a homepage link. As a result of that, I got a huge number of home page links from linked pages. What is your recommendation? Thanks! webmaster.png web_master_tools.png
Technical SEO | | Godad0 -
I noticed all my SEOed sites are getting attacked constantly by viruses. I do wordpress sites. Does anyone have a good recommendation to protect my clients sites? thanks
We have tried all different kinds of security plugins but none seem to work long term.
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Webmaster tools
Hello, My sites are showing odd "links to your site" data in WMT. Its not showing any links to the homepages and reduced links for other pages. Anyone else seeing this? Penguin refresh maybe?
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Site command
How reliable is site command? Is there any other way to check indexed pages.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670 -
Site 'filtered' by Google in early July.... and still filtered!
Hi, Our site got demoted by Google all of a sudden back in early July. You can view the site here: http://alturl.com/4pfrj and you may read the discussions I posted in Google's forums here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6e8f9aab7e384d88&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=276dc6687317641b&hl=en Those discussions chronicle what happened, and what we've done since. I don't want to make this a long post by retyping it all here, hence the links. However, we've made various changes (as detailed), such as getting rid of duplicate content (use of noindex on various pages etc), and ensuring there is no hidden text (we made an unintentional blunder there through use of a 3rd party control which used CSS hidden text to store certain data). We have also filed reconsideration requests with Google and been told that no manual penalty has been applied. So the problem is down to algorithmic filters which are being applied. So... my reason for posting here is simply to see if anyone here can help us discover if there is anything we have missed? I'd hope that we've addressed the main issues and that eventually our Google ranking will recover (ie. filter removed.... it isn't that we 'rank' poorly, but that a filter is bumping us down, to, for example, page 50).... but after three months it sure is taking a while! It appears that a 30 day penalty was originally applied, as our ranking recovered in early August. But a few days later it dived down again (so presumably Google analysed the site again, found a problem and applied another penalty/filter). I'd hope that might have been 30 or 60 days, but 60 days have now passed.... so perhaps we have a 90 day penalty now. OR.... perhaps there is no time frame this time, simply the need to 'fix' whatever is constantly triggering the filter (that said, I 'feel' like a time frame is there, especially given what happened after 30 days). Of course the other aspect that can always be worked on (and oft-mentioned) is the need for more and more original content. However, we've done a lot to increase this and think our Guide pages are pretty useful now. I've looked at many competitive sites which list in Google and they really don't offer anything more than we do..... so if that is the issue it sure is puzzling if we're filtered and they aren't. Anyway, I'm getting wordy now, so I'll pause. I'm just asking if anyone would like to have a quick look at the site and see what they can deduce? We have of course run it through SEOMoz's tools and made use of the suggestions. Our target pages generally rate as an A for SEO in the reports. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Go2Holidays0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0