Home Page Deindexed Only at Google after Recovering from Hack Attack
-
Hello, Facing a Strange issue, wordpress blog hghscience[dot]com was hacked by someone, when checked, I found index.php file was changed & it was showing some page with a hacked message, & also index.html file was added to the cpanel account.All pages were showing same message, when I found it, I replaced index.php to default wordpress index.php file & deleted index.htmlI could not find any other file which was looking suspicious. Site started working fine & it was also indexed but cached version was that hacked page. I used webmaster tool to fetch & render it as google bot & submitted for indexing. After that I noticed home page get deindexed by google. Rest all pages are indexing like before. Site was hacked around 30th July & I fixed it on 1st Aug. Since then home page is not getting indexed, I tried to fetch & index multiple time via google webmasters tool but no luck as of now. 1 More thing I Noticed, When I used info:mysite.com on google, its showing some other hacked site ( www.whatsmyreferer.com/ ) When Searching from India But when same info:mysite.com is searched from US a different hacked site is showing ( sigaretamogilev.by )However when I search "mysite.com" my site home page is appearing on google search but when I check cached URL its showing hacked sites mentioned above.As per my knowledge I checked all SEO Plugins, Codes of homepage, can't find anything which is not letting the homepage indexed.PS: webmaster tool has received no warning etc for penalty or malware.
I also noticed I disallowed index.php file via robots.txt earlier but now I even removed that. 7Dj1Q0w.png 3krfp9K.png
-
.htaccess file has nothing but
BEGIN WordPress
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule>END WordPress
Installed Plugins
Yoast SEO, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismat, Udinra All Image Sitemap, Social Share Bar (Digg Digg Alternative), Jetpack by WordPress.com, AuthorH Review.
Apart from Yoast, it seems nothing can block site, and Yoast settings are fine, just disabled tag indexing & subpages along with author archive.
Problem is something else I guess
-
Hi Ankit,
Though I have checked for the pages you're serving to bots, could you please have a look at your .htaccess file once? Does it contains something like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (google|yahoo) [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (google|aol|yahoo)Do you have your code's copy in github or bitbucket or any other source code management tool? If yes, please scan last few commits thoroughly.
You can create a list of plugins installed recently. Remove them one by one and submit your home page URL to GWT for fetching a fresh copy it every time. Not sure what's the issue here, let's do hit-and-trial to deep dive a bit.
-
Hey Alan,
Do let me know if you find some solution or identify the problem.
-
That's what. Not able to find any good information to go next-step for this. But, still checking random things with a "hope".
-
Domaintools domain report shows no more info that could be helpful. Leaving me at a complete loss as to what else to check.
-
More info.
Because Nitin was able to run a ping and traceroute without problem, I went to DomainTools.com - the worlds leading resource for forensic digital investigative research. I use it whenever I am doing investigations for expert witness work I do.
When I ran the domain there, it had a screen-capture of the home page from June. So I submitted a refresh, and it came back as not being able to provide a screen-shot of the home page.
While not a smoking gun issue, it further clouds my trust in regard to whether the domain is actually functioning properly in the hosting environment as I originally thought it might not be.
I will run a deeper test to see if I can get more information, however I wanted to post this update because I believe it relevant.
-
Well, this is probably 1 of the most interesting issues an SEO can come across with. Google is showing different cached version in different countries. For me, that's strange too. Is that usual thing?
-
Nitin
Thanks for doing that - Now I'm stumped - I've never had Pingdom fail before with both ping and traceroute. And I now wonder if it's a non-issue, or part of the confused mess that Ankit referenced somehow.
-
That's right, its showing different cached versions in different countries. Just checked for US here. Screenshot attached.
-
I think that index.php disallowed was not an issue, I took suggestion and removed it but many sites disallow index.php via robots.txt to avoid duplicate content issue in site.com & site.com/index.php
here is an example - http://www.shoutmeloud.com/robots.txt
Still I did it about 10-12 days ago, fetched & submitted to index & also put rendering request.
Attaching current Screenshot of last rendering request.
I think some other issue, what's your view on that info:site.com showing some other hacked sites, how's this happening & sites are also changing. Its different in India, Different in US.
-
Ping and traceroute worked for me when I tried using my terminal (screenshot is attached).
Well, I agree that the problem is actually bigger. If you see its cached version on google, it was last cached on 16th Aug i.e after the issue of index.php/index.html was fixed by the admin (another screenshot attached).
I tried to see this page as googlebot as well, couldn't find the issue (wanted to check it for cloaking as well).
-
UPDATE TO MY ORIGINAL COMMENT
I initially found a problem doing a ping and traceroute test using Pingdom.com - both returned an "invalid host name" error, something I have not seen previously for both ping and traceroute simultaneously.
Nitin (see his comment below) did a similar test locally and found both to be okay. Though he has other thoughts.
I just wanted to clarify here now, that my original finding may not be a key to this issue, though I want to understand why my test came back that way...
-
You said you remove the index.php from the robots.txt. I just wanted to when did that happened? Because after removal, it usually took some time to get back in index (crawler need to recrawl the website accordingly).
My advice is to resubmit your robots.txt and updated sitemap.xml to Webmaster console and wait for the next crawl and this should be fixed.
Hope this helps!
-
Just sent SC, Nothing helped so far, Its quite strange that the info:domain.com is now showing some other hacked URL. SC attached.
-
It was quite strange for me as well, Just attached Screen Shot after fetching for 1 more time.
1 more thing I noticed, that info:mysite.com is not showing some other Hacked domain. Not sure How it's happening & why It's happening.
Sorry for the delay in reply, I was not getting email updates so I though no one answered my question.
-
Hi Ankit! Did Nitin's suggestions help at all? And are you able to share the screenshot he asked for?
-
Check the following, may be it'll help you resolve the issue:
https://moz.com/community/q/de-indexed-homepage-in-google-very-confusing
https://moz.com/community/q/site-de-indexed-except-for-homepage
-
That's really strange. Could you please share the screenshot when you're trying to fetch it as google in the GWT?
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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
Technical SEO | | Chophel
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean?
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean? We have added some text in the pages with keywords thats related the page
Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers0 -
Google has deindexed 40% of my site because it's having problems crawling it
Hi Last week i got my fifth email saying 'Google can't access your site'. The first one i got in early November. Since then my site has gone from almost 80k pages indexed to less than 45k pages and the number is lowering even though we post daily about 100 new articles (it's a online newspaper). The site i'm talking about is http://www.gazetaexpress.com/ We have to deal with DDoS attacks most of the time, so our server guy has implemented a firewall to protect the site from these attacks. We suspect that it's the firewall that is blocking google bots to crawl and index our site. But then things get more interesting, some parts of the site are being crawled regularly and some others not at all. If the firewall was to stop google bots from crawling the site, why some parts of the site are being crawled with no problems and others aren't? In the screenshot attached to this post you will see how Google Webmasters is reporting these errors. In this link, it says that if 'Error' status happens again you should contact Google Webmaster support because something is preventing Google to fetch the site. I used the Feedback form in Google Webmasters to report this error about two months ago but haven't heard from them. Did i use the wrong form to contact them, if yes how can i reach them and tell about my problem? If you need more details feel free to ask. I will appreciate any help. Thank you in advance C43svbv.png?1
Technical SEO | | Bajram.Kurtishaj1 -
I have 3500 pages crawled by Google, - why is SEOMOZ only able to crawl 400 of these ?
I added my site almost two weeks ago to the PRO DashBoard, and so far only 404 pages has been crawled, - but I know for a fact that there is 3500 pages that should be crawled. Other search engines has no problem in crawling and indexing these pages, so what can be wrong here ?
Technical SEO | | haybob270 -
Can view pages of site, but Google & SEOmoz return 404
I can visit and view every page of a site (can also see source code), but Google, SEOmoz and others say anything other than home page is a 404 and Google won't index the sub-pages. I have check robots.txt and HTAccess and can't find anything wrong. Is this a DNS or server setting problem? Any ideas? Thanks, Fitz
Technical SEO | | FitzSWC0 -
Can I use canonical tags to merge property map pages and availability pages to their counterpart overview pages?
I have a property website, for each property are 4-5 tabs each with their own URL, these pages include the overview page which is content rich, and auxilliary pages such as maps, availability, can I use a canonical tag to merge the tabs with very little content to their corresponding overview page which is content rich? I.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview This page has tabs for map, town info, availability which all have their own url i.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/map
Technical SEO | | assertive-media
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/towninfo Because these auxilary pages do not contain much content can I place a canonical tag in them pointing back to the content rich overview page at www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview?0 -
Why do I see dramatic differences in impressions between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Insights for Search?
Has anyone else noticed discrepancies between these tools? Take keyword A and keyword B. I've literally seen situations where A has 3 or 4 times the traffic as B in Google Webmaster Tools, but half the traffic of B in Google Insights for Search. What might be the reason for this discrepancy?
Technical SEO | | ir-seo-account0 -
Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/
Technical SEO | | kchandler0