Articles marked with "This site may be hacked," but I have no security issues in the search console. What do I do?
-
There are a number of blog articles on my site that have started receiving the "This site may be hacked" warning in the SERP.
I went hunting for security issues in the Search Console, but it indicated that my site is clean. In fact, the average position of some of the articles has increased over the last few weeks while the warning has been in place.
The problem sounds very similar to this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/malware--hacked-sites/wmG4vEcr_l0 but that thread hasn't been touched since February. I'm fearful that the Google Form is no longer monitored.
What other steps should I take?
One query where I see the warning is "Brand Saturation" and this is the page that has the warning: http://brolik.com/blog/should-you-strive-for-brand-saturation-in-your-marketing-plan/
-
Thanks, Paul. We started resubmitting the cleaned pages yesterday. I passed your comments about the Apache install and the old version of PHP to the devs as well.
At the very least, this is a great learning experience for us. It's great to have such a helpful community.
-
It looks like the devs have cleaned up most of the obvious stuff, Matthew, so I'd get to work resubmitting the pages that were marked as hacked but now longer show that issue.
Do make sure the devs keep working on finding and cleaning up attack vectors (or just bite the bullet and pay for a year of Sucuri cleanup and protection) but it's important to get those marked pages discovered as clean before too much longer.
Also of note - your site's server's Apache install is quite a bit out of date and you're running a very old version of PHP as well that hasn't been getting even security updates for over a year. Those potential attack vectors need to be addressed right away too.
Good luck getting back into Big G's good graces!
Paul
P.S. Easy way to find the pages marked as hacked for checking/resubmission is a "site:" search e.g. enter **site:brolik.com **into a Google search.
P.P.S. Also noted that you have many pages from brolik-temp.com also still indexed. The domain name just expired yesterday, but the indexed pages showed a 302-redirect to the main domain, according to the Wayback Machine. These should be 301s in order to help get the pages to eventually drop out of the SERPS. (And with 301s in place, you could either submit a "Change of Address" for that domain in Webmaster Tools/GSC or you do a full removal request. Either way, I wouldn't want those test domain pages to remain in the indexes.
-
Thank you, Paul. That was going to be my next question: what to do when the blog is clean.
Unfortunately, the dev's are still frantically pouring through code hunting for the problem. Hopefully they find it soon.
-
Just a heads-up that you'll want to get this cleaned up as quickly as possible, Matthew. Time really is of the essence here.
Once this issue is recognised by the crawler as being widespread enough to trigger a warning in GSC, it can take MONTHS to get the hacked warning removed from the SERPS after cleanup.
Get the hack cleaned up, then immediately start submitting the main pages of the site back to Fetch as Google tool to get them recrawled and detected as clean.
I recently went through a very similar situation with a client and was able to get the hacked notification removed for most URLs within 3 and 4 days of cleanup.
Paul
-
Passed it on to the dev. Thanks for the response.
I'll let you know if they run into any trouble cleaning it up.
-
It is hacked, you just have to look at the page as Googlebot. Sadly, I have seen this before.
If you set your user agent as Googlebot - you will see a different page (see attached images). Note that the Title, H1 tags and content are updated to show info on how to Buy Zithromax. This is a JS insertion hack where when the user agent is shown as Googlebot they overwrite your content and insert links to pages to help gain links. This is very black hat and bad and yes scary. (See attached images below)
I use "User Agent Switcher" on FF to set my user agent - there are lots of other tools for FF and Chrome to do this. You can also run a spider on your site such as screaming frog and set the user agent to Googlebot and you will see all the changed H1s and title tags,
It is clever as "humans" will not see this, but the bots will so it is hard to detect. Also, if you have multiple servers, you may only have 1 of the servers impacted and so you may not see this each time depending on what server your load balancer is sending you to. You may want to use Fetch as Google in Webmaster console and see what Google sees.
This is very serious, show this to your dev and get it fixed ASAP. You can PM me if you need more information etc.
Good luck!
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
-
Is there an issue with my site?
Been mostly hanging around top of page two for the last couple of years for “Liverpool Wedding photographer” although got myself on page 1 for “Liverpool photographer” I have split the title of the page to target these two keywords. I took the Liverpool photographer off the title to see if it was being detrimental to the “Liverpool wedding photographer” I didn’t see no increase in ranking so put it back as I get a bit of commercial work from it. Since last year I have got onto page 1 at least three times around position 5-6. Within a week or two I start sliding down again and end up back at top of page two. I could understand this slow push out if my competitors were busy SEO wise but from what I have seen they are not. There is a guy using the keywords in URL and calls himself “Liverpool wedding photographer” last time I checked he literally had no links but is in the first 5 positions. I have I think a better link profile than every one else. Although I am on and off with Facebook and Instagram, (more off) so that probably isn’t helping. Although I have a colleague in the video side of things and he doesn’t use social media at all and it hasn’t harmed him. A few years ago I was burned quite badly by a total charlatan. He sunk my home page to page 4. He talked the talk about creating landing pages but his methods were shoddy to say the least. I can’t believe I was taken in by him, although I was only with him for 2 months. He was still using spammy link techniques to generate lots of toxic links for me! I disavowed all of his links and put the keywords back on the home page and was back to my usual top of page 2 position within a week. Since then I have disavowed all directory links and anything not wedding related. I have an article which ranks 1st or second for “Nikon CLS”. I have also another article of 2000 words or so on another reasonable placed photography website. A few links from other vendors or people I have taken photographs for. I have about 10 featured weddings with a link on 4 good weddings blogs. I don’t think a massive amount of blog comments although I have stopped doing this. If I look at most of the competitors these are their main links, with directories as well! Last winter I put a quite substantial article about documentary wedding photography on my home page. I flew to number 2, although I photographed The World Transformed (the alternative labour conference in Liverpool). I got a lot of clicks to a gallery page (few thousand off social media} so I don’t know if that coincided with it. Same thing – watching the website go down a few positions every day until within just over a week or two I was about 4<sup>th</sup> on page 2! Its like my website is on a spring which can push into page 1 but rebounds back to top of page 2. I am staring to worry that my site has been marked as a bad character in some way because I get what seems to be rough treatment from google compared to my peers. I have written I think 4 or 5 (1500 word) articles the last couple of months talking about lenses and wedding photography related topics and Google pushed me back to page 1, peaking At position 5. I was there for a few weeks and then the slide happened again. Bit demoralised at the moment, what to do? Any help or pointers would be most appreciated. Best wishes. David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Is possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using Google Search Console?
We have a client that will not grant us access to their Google Search Console (don't ask us why). Is there anyway possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using GSC? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
New site. How important is traffic for a new site? And what about domain age?
Hi guys. I've been building a new site because i've seen a real SEO opportunity out there. I'm a mixing professional by trade and so I wanted to take advantage of SEO to help gain more work. Here's the site: www.signalchainstudios.co.uk I'm curious about domain age. This site fairly well optimised for my keywords, and my site got pretty good content on it (i think so anyway). But it's no where to be seen on the SERP's (link at all). Is this just a domain age issue? I'd have though it might be in the top 50 because my site's services are not hard to rank for at all! Also what about traffic? Does Google want to see an 'active' site before it considers 'promoting' it up the ranks? Or are back links and good content the main factor in the equation? Thanks in advance. I love this community to bits 🙂 Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6631 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
Original Site content was used for submission to article directories
I had a communication problem with my writer and she used original unspun content and posted it to Unique Article Wizard. So all UAW does is take each paragraph and mix them up. So I searched a sentence on my site where the content came from and got back a bunch of returns for that sentence. My site wasn't the first result returned. I"m wondering how bad that is going to be for me. The links from UAW are going back to an anchor layer that then links back to this site. Can anyone tell me if I need to rewrite the content on the original site? That is the only way I can think to make that not an issue. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtking.us_gmail.com0 -
Do I have to tell WBT site moved to a subdirectory on another internal site?
I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0