What to do if you've been hacked.....
-
Just logged into our CMS system and it appears we have been hacked.
All page titles have been hijacked adding a secondary title tag linking out to website http://emapaydayloans.com with anchor text pay day loans.
Our Web Dev team are working on fixing the hack now. My concern is the potential knock on effect to SEO.
This looks like a bad neighbourhood site:
- 3 pages indexed
- PR 0
And for I don't know how long we've had almost every page on all our domains linking out with the following page title including the same link and anchor text:
I assume its a wait and see at this stage.
-
Thanks for the responses guys, looks like an SQL Injection.
We have cleared the import and all is back to normal. We'll be looking in to beefing up protection. Thanks for the advice. Will be keeping my eye on the traffic via analytics and watching out for messages in Webmaster Tools
-
This type of problem is really hard to fix unless you know how to do the deep scrubbing needed to get rid of the problem. If you don't scrub it properly the problem will recur over and over.
I would hire a pro ASAP.
-
if you have a paid hosting company call them and they'll run tools on your site to find any exploits.
if your traffic is holding steady you might be ok, just get those links off your site and take care of the security holes. Also your FTP write/edit permissions might need to be tightened up.
-
Fix it as quick as possible
Find any exploits you may have missed (keep WP Up to date, disable admin account, if on shared hosting check all file permissions, make sure you are using SFTP (port 22) ect...)
Monitor your traffic for drops and check web cache of Google to see if it was even indexed
If you do take a knock (which I doubt unless it was there for a while) I am not sure a reconsideration would do anything, so you will probably just have to do some damage control
(ie... get lots of social mentions on a good piece of industry relevant content)
Hope this helps
PS this can help you with hardening WP install http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
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
-
How Do You Know or Find Out if You've been hit by a Google Penalty?
Hi Moz Community, How do you find out if you have been hit with a Google Penalty? Thanks, Gary
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gdavey0 -
OSE report doesn't quite reflect the fact for me?
Hope someone could get me some insight if possible. We operate SEO purely on whitehat and for a popular keyword that we have worked hard for years now we ranks 10th. I have compared us with a few competitors who rank better (ranked 1st and 3rd) on OSE and found things confusing. In the following matrix we are way ahead of them in: Domain Authority
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LauraHT
Page Authority
Just-Discovered
root domain
total links
Social like/Social shares All score of above of our site are substantially higher than the competitors. one of the competitors has only one thing better than us:
Internal Equity-Passing Links plus It shows that both competitors have lots of low quality links as follow -forum signature anchor text links where the account no contribution to the forum
-low authority directories links where many of them are overseas and not industry specific
-links from article sites
-link from sites that are in totally different industries where we only have very a few or no from above I am thinking if the matrix figures from OSE dont count then what else I should be looking at. Any advice? please forgive me if I chose the wrong support question type.0 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
If our site hasn't been hit with the Phantom Update, are we clear?
Our SEO provider created a bunch of "unique url" websites that have direct match domain names. The content is pretty much the same for over 130 websites (city name is different) that link directly to our main site. For me this was a huge red flag, but when I questioned them and they said it was fine. We haven't seen a drop in traffic, but concerned that Google just hasn't gotten to us. DA for each of these sites are 1 after several months. Should we be worried? I think yes, but I am an SEO newbie.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
Site architecture change - +30,000 404's in GWT
So recently we decided to change the URL structure of our online e-commerce catalogue - to make it easier to maintain in the future. But since the change, we have (partially expected) +30K 404's in GWT - when we did the change, I was doing 301 redirects from our Apache server logs but it's just escalated. Should I be concerned of "plugging" these 404's, by either removing them via URL removal tool or carry on doing 301 redirections? It's quite labour intensive - no incoming links to most of these URL's, so is there any point? Thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Duplicate content or not? If you're using abstracts from external sources you link to
I was wondering if a page (a blog post, for example) that offers links to external web pages along with abstracts from these pages would be considered duplicate content page and therefore penalized by Google. For example, I have a page that has very little original content (just two or three sentences that summarize or sometimes frame the topic) followed by five references to different external sources. Each reference contains a title, which is a link, and a short abstract, which basically is the first few sentences copied from the page it links to. So, except from a few sentences in the beginning everything is copied from other pages. Such a page would be very helpful for people interested in the topic as the sources it links to had been analyzed before, handpicked and were placed there to enhance user experience. But will this format be considered duplicate or near-duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | romanbond0 -
Pages For Products That Don't Exist Yet?
Hi, I have a client that makes products that are accessories for other company's popular consumer products. Their own products on their website rank for other companies product names like, for made up example "2011 Super Widget" and then my client's product... "Charger." So, "Super Widget 2011 Charger" might be the type of term my client would rank for. Everybody knows the 2012 Super Widget will be out in some months and then my client's company will offer the 2012 Super Widget Charger. What do you think of launching pages now for the 2012 Super Widget Charger. even though it doesn't exist yet in order to give those pages time to rank while the terms are half as competitive. By the time the 2012 is available, these pages have greater authority/age and rank, instead of being a little late to the party? The pages would be like "coming soon" pages, but still optimized to the main product search term. About the only negative I see is that they'lll have a higher bounce rate/lower time on page since the 2012 doesn't even exist yet. That seems like less of a negative than the jump start on ranking. What do you think? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010 -
Somebody hacked many sites and put links to my sites in hidden div
I had 300 good natural links to my site from different sites and site ranked great for my keywords. Somebody (I suppose my competitor) has hacked other sites 2 days ago (checked Google cache) and now Yahoo Site Explorer shows 600 backlinks. I've checked new links - they all are in the same hidden div block - top:-100px; position:absolute;. I'm afraid that Google may penalize my site for these links. I'm contacting webmasters of these sites and their hosting so they remove these links. Is it possible to give Google a notice that these links are not mine so it could just skip them not penalizing me? Is it safe to make "Spam report" regarding links to my own site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zarades0