4 ms·
Hey Kevin, normally this means you've been hacked by a spammer. Often the spammers do sneaky things like return a spam page if you have a google.com referrer (e
by Matt_Cutts 16y ago
Hey Kevin, normally this means you've been hacked by a spammer. Often the spammers do sneaky things like return a spam page if you have a google.com referrer (e.g. if you click on search result on Google). Meanwhile, they might return a 404 if you enter the url directly in the address bar.
The first place I'd check is your .htaccess file--that's a common place where the hackers hide stuff. Also check for new/recently-added files in your directory. Some WordPress hackers will go so far as to inject malicious code straight into the WP database.
One tool you can use is a feature from google.com/webmasters called "Fetch as Googlebot." Once you prove that you own the site, you can tell Google to fetch your page and you'll see exactly what we see. This is a great way to tell if you've really cleaned out the hacks.
Another tool is our automatic url removal tool, also at google.com/webmasters . You can block a url in robots.txt and then use that tool to remove that page from Google's index.
If you've gotten everything, then the pages should start to leave Google's index after a few days. The hackers can be quite smart though, and if they compromise your webhost then it's even more painful to scrape them off your site because the hacked pages can return even if your site is well-patched.
- krug 16y agoMatt, If it's a WordPress Hack which I'm sure it is. Here's the solution: http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.php http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.ph... Can we not ask them to remove their site from Google that seems like drastic errancy as it takes months and sometimes longer for reinclusion requests to go through. Seems like a hasty and unneccesary methodology to the problem.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoHacked sites can serve up malware, viruses, trojan horses, etc. so we really do need to remove hacked sites from our index until we're confident that the site is clean.