Client suffered a malware attack. Removed links not being crawled by Google!
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Hi all,
My client suffered a malware attack a few weeks ago where an external site somehow created 700 plus links on my clients site with their content. I removed all of the content and redirected the pages to the home page. I then created a new temporary xml sitemap with those 700 links and submitted the sitemap to Google 9 days ago. Google has crawled the sitemap a few times but not the individual links. When I click on the crawl report for the sitemap in GSC, I see that the individual links still have the last crawled date from before they were removed. So in Googles eyes, that old malicioud content still exists.
What do I do to ensure Google knows the contnt is gone and redirected?
Thanks!
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I'm sorry to hear that that happened to you.
I'm assuming that you do not have a backup?
if you do have a backup obviously could return your site to normal but let's base this question on the idea that you do not have a backup.
what I would do is make sure that that site is cleaned up professionally if you do it through this Sucuri I can tell you through first-hand experience they do an excellent job & will back the work for one year and it sounds like you have a pretty nasty bit of malware on your site. Go here and you can have the site crawled and it will tell you a little bit more about what has infected the site and then you can purchase one of their plans to have your site
https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ this is a free check of the site I am sure you'll see that you had some sort of malware injection.
This is where you go to purchase the plan that best fits your budget and your needs. All of the plans will remove the hack from your site and remove any blacklists
https://sucuri.net/website-security-platform/signup/
This is 100% platform-independent and will give you a very powerful firewall for free with the service for the next year as well. This will prevent your site from being attacked in the same manner it was before.
I wish I had a free solution to offer you but this is the closest thing and it's definitely cheaper than hiring a developer to try to figure out whether it's a really bad attack or just something minor you want to make sure. all those back doors are closed.
I hope this is of help to you,
Tom
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