Client suffered a malware attack. Removed links not being crawled by Google!
-
Hi all,
My client suffered a malware attack a few weeks ago where an external site somehow created 700 plus links on my clients site with their content. I removed all of the content and redirected the pages to the home page. I then created a new temporary xml sitemap with those 700 links and submitted the sitemap to Google 9 days ago. Google has crawled the sitemap a few times but not the individual links. When I click on the crawl report for the sitemap in GSC, I see that the individual links still have the last crawled date from before they were removed. So in Googles eyes, that old malicioud content still exists.
What do I do to ensure Google knows the contnt is gone and redirected?
Thanks!
-
I'm sorry to hear that that happened to you.
I'm assuming that you do not have a backup?
if you do have a backup obviously could return your site to normal but let's base this question on the idea that you do not have a backup.
what I would do is make sure that that site is cleaned up professionally if you do it through this Sucuri I can tell you through first-hand experience they do an excellent job & will back the work for one year and it sounds like you have a pretty nasty bit of malware on your site. Go here and you can have the site crawled and it will tell you a little bit more about what has infected the site and then you can purchase one of their plans to have your site
https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ this is a free check of the site I am sure you'll see that you had some sort of malware injection.
This is where you go to purchase the plan that best fits your budget and your needs. All of the plans will remove the hack from your site and remove any blacklists
https://sucuri.net/website-security-platform/signup/
This is 100% platform-independent and will give you a very powerful firewall for free with the service for the next year as well. This will prevent your site from being attacked in the same manner it was before.
I wish I had a free solution to offer you but this is the closest thing and it's definitely cheaper than hiring a developer to try to figure out whether it's a really bad attack or just something minor you want to make sure. all those back doors are closed.
I hope this is of help to you,
Tom
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
-
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
Technical SEO | | killthebillion0 -
Google UK and the slog of Link building
Background:
Technical SEO | | Brinley
I have a number of sites built using the open eCommerce software zen cart. One of these sites was penalised by the original Penguin algorithm back in April 24, 2012. The reason for the panalty was that two ecommerce sites in Hong kong had a link to the above site in the footer of their 2000 & 4000 product website. I have no idea why the site had these links and even though I did contact them a few months before the Penguin massacre asking them to remove the footer link I was technically unaware of the ticking time bomb that they presented. The result, as is now engrained in SEO history, was that the site was moved to sit alongside Googles equivalent of the restaurant at the end of the universe and stayed there for 2 years until April 2014.
As I had never indulged in link building for the simple reason that I found it laborious I was obviously infuriated with the resulting loss of revenue but that was balanced with an understanding that I had not kept pace with the changing landscape of SEO according to Google. The quest I am now on is to increase my 3 sites profile on the web without getting another spanking from Google in the near future. The problem I have is that white hat today may well be black hat tomorrow. (I can recall the days when Google said links are good and everyone went out and asked other websites to link with them and look where that led.) So do I ignore actively cultivating links as some suggest and look to produce good content (which is quite difficult when you make mugs and candles by the way.) or do you go out and look to intentionally build links by studying competitors links, reviewing link opportunity or get bloggers to review products. For a small lifestyle entrepreneur like myself, the ever changing seo landscape and the amount of time & effort it requires is slowly and inevitably pushing us back out to that restaurant mentioned earlier. If only Google had a little brother that was designed purely for small businesses - like it was in the good old days before the dinosaur that is big business grunt and thought hmmm! whats that?
And if there were such a thing I would add a caveat that it would be illegal to generate pointless amount of cyber content because the web is becoming something akin to a landfill. Which leaves me nowhere really - but I think I am okay with that. Waiter !!0 -
Backlink Profile: Should I disavow these links? Auto-Generated Links etc
Hello Moz Community, At first I wanted to say that I really like the Q&A section and that I read and learned a lot - and today it is time for my first own question 😉 I checked our backlink-profile these days and I found in my opinion a few bad/spammy links, most of them are auto-generated by pickung up some (meta) information from our webpage. Now my question is if I should dasavow these links over webmasters or if these links shouldn't matter as I guess basically every webpage will be picked up from them. Especially from the perspective that our rankings dropped significantly last weeks, but I am not sure if this can be the real reason. Examples are pages like: https://www.askives.com/ -Auto-Generates for example meta descriptions with links http://www.websitesalike.com/ -find similar websites http://mashrom.ir/ -no idea about this, really crazy Or we are at http://www.europages.com/, which makes sense for me and we get some referral traffic as well, but they auto-generated links from all their TLDs like .gr / .it / .cn etc. -just disavow all other TLDs than .com? Another example would be links from OM services like: seoprofiler.com Moreover we have a lot of links from different HR portals (including really many outdated job postings). Can these links “hurt” as well? Thanks a lot for your help! Greez Heiko
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
Paid Links - How does Google classify them?
Greetings All, I have a question regarding "Paid Links." My company creates custom websites for other small businesses across the country. We always have backlinks to our primary website from our "Dealer Sites." Would Google and other search engines consider links from our "dealer sites" to be "paid links?" Example:
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO
http://www.atlanticautoinc.com/ is the "dealer site." Would Google consider the links from Atlantic Auto to be a "paid link," and therefor have less of an impact for page rankings, due to it not being organic? Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!!0 -
Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn811 -
Broken LInks Tool?
Hi I am trying to find broken links on my site, Is there a tool for this? Free or Paid tool is fine thanks.
Technical SEO | | daracreative0 -
Is this against google rules
Hi i am wanting to know if this is against google rules. I am building a website which will have lots of different sections and i wanted to know if you were allowed to have a new domain name pointing to a section of the site. so for example if i had a site with a domain name of manchester and then i wanted a section of the site to be called www.manchester.com/complimentary health I want to know if to help with traffic to the site and to have a better domain name, if it was allowed to have a new domain name pointing to that section of the site which could be called www.complimentaryhealth.com and have that pointing to the section. would love to hear your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google Shopping Australia/Google Merchant Centre
So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites. Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review. I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer. Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status. Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.
Technical SEO | | Brendo0