Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?

[CayenneRed89]

Hi Guys,

I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection.  The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected.

All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built.  That was the easy part

The problems comes when I look on Webmaster.  Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site.  These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links.

I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings.  Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively.

I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine.

Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty?

Thanks, Duncan

[Dr-Pete]

Piggybacking on Kane - since these bad/phantom pages were in one folder, can you request removal in Search Console? It should at least speed things up. Unfortunately, the links can show for weeks or months after they're removed, even if Google doesn't seem to be caching them. If the pages aren't indexed/cached, and the numbers in the console seem to be gradually dropping, I'm not sure if there's a lot more you can do, unfortunately.

[KaneJamison]

Hey Duncan, sounds like you've covered the basics. If this had happened a month ago I'd tell you to wait it out, but since it's been 5 months it seems like it should have cleared up by now if it was simply a matter of waiting for Google to deindex everything.

I've put a note out to other associates on Moz Q&A to see if they have any suggestions.

[CayenneRed89]

We got a hacked site warning on Google results for the company Brand name....but nothing in the Search Console.

Performance is not exactly site wide - some pages only rank for exact match page title search term but not any variations...  (e.g. Very Green widgets -  page title - the site will rank for Very Green widgets but no variations e.g. Green widgets).

Other pages seem to be fine.... but none rank on page one.

It does seem those pages that had the most links pointing to them have been affected the worse.  However, that said - there is a page that that has several 1000 internal spammy links showing but the page does rank ok and does rank for different keywords....another piece of the puzzle!

We checked rankings and at the time of the hack - the site definitely dropped.

Hope that helps!!

Duncan

[KaneJamison]

Gotcha... It's fairly standard to see old links in Search Console that have long since been removed, so that concerns me less as long as the 404s are showing up properly and getting noindexed.

Did you receive any "hacked site" warnings in Search Console back in May?

As far as performance issues - is this sitewide, or does it just seem to be occurring on the pages that had the most links pointed at them? Do you still have any pages ranking in top 3 for a semi-competitive term? Out of the pages that did have spammy links to them, are any performing well - on page 1 for target keyword?

[CayenneRed89]

HI Kane

Thanks for your response!  We did do a disavow just on some old directories which looked ok - but it was more of a precautionary measure.

CMS is now all good and secure.

The spammy links were a in subfolder which was deleted (creating 1000's of 404's).  The website was then entirely moved to a new secure hosting environment.

Just on your questions...

Yes - the website was fine up until the hack.

The hack happened in May of this year.....a full clean up happened within 3 days after the attack.

Your last point.....yes - they are showing up as 404's.  The website initially had 17,000 spammy 404 errors.  Google has since reduced that to 3000.  As these pages are removed from the index, this gives me hope that the problem is being resolved.

However - the strange part - even though the 404's are being reduced in Webmaster, the number of internal spammy links showing in the Console are not being reduced.  It's static.

For example, the homepage shows 6,300 internal links.  In reality it only has about a 120.  The rest are all spammy (404) links. I do believe that this is causing ranking problems.....?  Do you think that is right?

Thanks, Duncan

[KaneJamison]

Hi Duncan,

Here's some initial thoughts on steps I would take:

• Since external links are fine, there shouldn't be a need to do anything disavow-related, but I would definitely do that if you see any external links pointed to those old pages, which is common with hacked sites.
• Sounds like you've covered your bases regarding preventing the site from getting hacked again at a CMS level, database level, plugin level, etc., so I'll assume that is good to go.
• If these spammy internal pages were all in a specific subfolder, you could block that subfolder via Robots.txt to send a stronger signal that the URLs should be ignored and de-indexed.
• The internal links should disappear as the pages are removed from the index, but that can take awhile, and it's not uncommon for Search Console to display pages/links/data that have since gone away.

And a couple of questions for you:

• Once those bases are covered, then you're still faced with the potential "penalty", or poor performance. I'm assuming that these pages not ranking in Google were performing well before the site hack?
• How long has it been since the site was initially hacked, and how long since full cleanup was completed?
• Are the spammy internal pages showing up as 404 crawl errors yet?