I am stuck with a nasty cloaking hack
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Hi There
I am just three weeks into my SEO career and I bumped into this issue with one of our clients.
I found a massive cloaking hack. In google search console I was shown 404 errors for many links and that is what everyone can see, however, when I crawled the site as a google bot I got 200ok messages and was shown a full page of essays, videos, links etc.. This obviously caused a significant drop in the website's ranking.
This looks to be a professional and well hidden hack. I googled many different tools to check for cloaking all of then said no error, here are some of the tools I checked for hacking: seo tools, bruce clay, webconfs, web tool hub, small SEO tools, and many more and none of them found the problem. The issue only came up when I manually searched the site as a google bot.
What can I do in this situation? I am stumped. Whats with all these tools? What should I do as a next step?
Thanx for your advice, Ruchy
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we are dealing with a tire company and there are essays about ceramic, velcro, essay writing, laser hair removal etc.
There are also videos and pictures there
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How do you even know it's a hack, and not some wrong config or improper coding? I mean, we are all happy to help you with advice, but services are services
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HI Dmitrii
I found a whole new direction to the issue.
It seems like the hackers didn't give google bot different information, they made the information visible to everyone but only after refreshing the page. This happens very inconsistently; it doesn't change every single time the page is refreshed.
It looks crazy to me I have no clue what this is or what i should do about it
Can you help me?
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Hi Dmitrii
Thanks so much for trying to help me.
I found a lot of 404 errors with funny URLs so i ran the site with user agent switcher as Googlebot and I got 200 ok status code and pages with information, videos, images, graphs, essays, etc.
I tried screaming frog and showed me some unknown files
Now I am stuck I want to know where to get to the root of the problem or any way how to proceed.
I really appreciate your help
Ruchy
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Howdy.
What is returned if you do fetch as google in Google Search Console?
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