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
-
Get List Of All Indexed Google Pages
I know how to run site:domain.com but I am looking for software that will put these results into a list and return server status (200, 404, etc). Anyone have any tips?
Technical SEO | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
New site: More pages for usability, or fewer more detailed pages for greater domain authority flow?
Ladies and gents! We're building a new site. We have a list of 28 professions, and we're wondering whether or not to include them all on one long and detailed page, or to keep them on their own separate pages. Thinking about the flow of domain authority - I could see 28 pages diluting it quite heavily - but at the same time, I think having the separate pages would be better for the user. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap1 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
Moving Some Content From Page A to Page B
Page A has written content, pictures, videos. The written content from Page A is being moved to Page B. When Google crawls the pages next time around will Page B receive the content credit? Will there not be any issues that this content originally belonged to Page A? Page A is not a page I want to rank for (just have great pictures and videos for users). Can I 301 redirect from Page A to B since the written content from A has been deleted or no need? Again, I intent to keep Page A live because good value for users to see pictures and videos.
Technical SEO | | khi50 -
Does adding subcategory pages to an commerce site limit the link juice to the product pages?
I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages. Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
How do fix twin home pages
Search engine analysis is indicating that my site has twin home pages (www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com). The error message I'm getting is: "your website resides at both www.mysite.com and mysite.com. My uploaded index page is a .htm page (not .html). I don't know if that matters. Can someone explain how this happened and what I can do to fix it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | finalfrontier0 -
What pages of my site does Google rank as the most important?
If I type site:youtube.com into Google, are the results listed by what Google considers to be the most important pages of the site? If I change my sitemap should this order change? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0