Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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.
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
-
Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags
Hi there! I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it? Thank you for your help in advance! L
Technical SEO | Nov 29, 2019, 10:07 AM | Chris_Wright1 -
Google will index us, but Bing won't. Why?
Bing is crawling our site, but not indexing it, and we cannot figure out why -- plus it's being indexed fine in Google. Any ideas on what the issue with Bing might be? Here's are some details to let you know what we've already checked/established: We have 4 301’s and the rest of our site checks out We’ve already established our Robots is ok, and that we are fixing our site map/it's in fine shape We do not see anything blocking bingbot access to the site There is no varnish or any load balancers, so nothing on that end that would be blocking the access We also don't see any rules in the apache or the .htaccess config that would be blocking the access
Technical SEO | Oct 12, 2024, 7:21 PM | Alex_RevelInteractive1 -
How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?
We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website. My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain. Currently our URL structure is... domain.com/products/product-name.html domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.
Technical SEO | Jan 13, 2015, 8:16 PM | bearpaw0 -
Will Google Recrawl an Indexed URL Which is No Longer Internally Linked?
We accidentally introduced Google to our incomplete site. The end result: thousands of pages indexed which return nothing but a "Sorry, no results" page. I know there are many ways to go about this, but the sheer number of pages makes it frustrating. Ideally, in the interim, I'd love to 404 the offending pages and allow Google to recrawl them, realize they're dead, and begin removing them from the index. Unfortunately, we've removed the initial internal links that lead to this premature indexation from our site. So my question is, will Google revisit these pages based on their own records (as in, this page is indexed, let's go check it out again!), or will they only revisit them by following along a current site structure? We are signed up with WMT if that helps.
Technical SEO | Jul 25, 2014, 3:57 PM | kirmeliux0 -
How to fix Google index after fixing site infected with malware.
Hi All Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google). Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total). These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically) Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings? Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links). Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them. Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google? Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things? Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it. Regards, Ian
Technical SEO | Apr 23, 2014, 2:11 AM | iragless0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | Sep 16, 2013, 6:51 PM | melen0 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | Feb 6, 2013, 4:56 PM | Scott-Thomas0 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | Mar 13, 2013, 3:49 AM | rahulchowdhury0