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Thank you everyone for your responses! The link you sent of the cached pages LynnP was also helpful. As soon as my co-worker who administers the server gets in I'm going to mention to him that we check the subfolders for anything fishy. I know for a fact he looked for subfolders that were suspicious but I'm not sure he may have thought to check the existing folders for sneaky things. Most passwords have been changed... but I will double check.

Again, thanks everyone for your help, very useful!

Yeah, only 2 of us, server admin guy. We're talking right now and the site is on a brand new VPS that has never been compromised, no strange folder structure, brand new install of Wordpress.. you can see lots of server errors in the error log on the server but the files NEVER existed, and neither of us removed the files. I, personally, do not even have access to the VPS. Only he does, and he is well aware what he's doing and most definitely would have noticed an odd set of folders and would have remembered deleting them. Almost as soon as we made the wordpress install live is when the 404 crawl errors showed up in google, and on the server. We both have seen many instances of wordpress sites being compromised and know what to look for and how to clean it up. This is why this is baffling. Because we're not exactly sure how or in what way they would benefit from this. My server admin thinks these hackers are somehow tricking google somehow... we just both have never seen this and not sure what to expect... very bizarre!

Well, the interesting thing is the links are only showing up on the subdomain news.mshowells.com - which has only existed on the server for maybe 2 - 3 months? Also, when we first noticed them, we checked the server and wordpress and there were no files and nothing was out of order or anything fishy. Everything was and is just fine. We haven't done any cleanup of any sort. And Wordpress & plugins have been kept up to date.

That's why it's weird because at no point were there hacked files or content or anything... so it's a little confusing...

Hello everyone,

I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice.

So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page.

Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)