Malicious links on our site indexed by Google but only visible to bots

[SEO-Bas]

We've been suffering from some very nasty black hat seo. In Google's index, our pages show external links to various pharmaceutical websites, but our actual live pages don't show them. It seems as though only certain user-agents see the malicious links. Setting up Screaming Frog SEO crawler using the Googlebot user agent also sees the malicious links.

Any idea what could have caused this or how this can be stopped? We scanned all files on our webserver and couldn't find any of malicious links. We've changed our FTP and CMS passwords, is there anything else we can do?

Thanks in advance!

[MattRoney]

Hi SEO-Bas! Just checking, is the issue resolved? I want to make sure you get the help you need, if not.

[SEO-Bas]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your help. The problem seems to be fixed by doing the following:

• Restore backup
• Change all relevant passwords
• Fetch and crawl all affected pages
• Get malicious URL's on our domain in Google's index removed from Google's index

See more affected websites (make sure to load the page in Google's cache): https://www.google.nl/search?q="viagra+kopen"&safe=off&biw=1680&bih=881&tbs=qdr:w&ei=AbSgV_uvM8j6aeaHkKAH&start=0&sa=N

Thanks anyways!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Bas,

Without looking in more detail, it is almost impossible to say how it has been done, but there are so many dirty tricks out there.

Is the site running on Wordpress? Do you want to PM me an example to have a look at?

-Andy