Google Hacked Spam Algorithmic Changes Rolling Out

[Dustybones]

I just took on a new client this week that has been hacked. In the process, Google has indexed 100+ additional pages of Spam relating to a shoe company. Its pretty much saturated her brand in SERPS. So glad to see Google is publicly addressing this.

Google Releases New Hacked Site Algorithm Impacting 5% Of Queries

Recently we have started rolling out a series of algorithmic changes that aim to tackle hacked spam in our search results. A huge amount of legitimate sites are hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behavior, such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs, etc.

Website owners that don?t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked. This can include government sites, universities, small business, company websites, restaurants, hobby organizations, conferences, etc. Spammers and cyber-criminals purposely seek out those sites and inject pages with malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines.

Above is just a snippet, so head over to read the rest.




Any of you have experiences with Spam in SERPS???


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[CodyBaird]

@dustybones if you check the query "monte vista family dentistry" you will notice that Google displays "this site may be hacked" below the url.

I pitched this Dr yesterday and noticed he had 1600 pages. I also noticed the alert by Google. Pretty cool.

If you do a site operator (site:montevistaramilydental.com) and scroll to pages 5 through 10 of the results you can see what all those hacked pages look like.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[Dustybones]

Thanks Cody. I've got a similar client I just brought on. The site only has 7 pages, but it indexing 112. Bing and Yahoo are both indexing the correct number of pages. Monte vista dental looks to only have 7 pages as well, but much worse of a situation.

For those interested, here is some Google info on how to address this issue Cody is dealing with.

Remove this message from your site

The "This site may be hacked" notification won't be removed until the webmaster of the site takes action.

Try these steps to fix your website:

1. Register and verify your site in Google’s Search Console.
2. Sign in to Search Console and check the "Security Issues" section to see details of sample URLs that might be hacked. Fix the security issue that allowed your website to be infected. Otherwise, your site is likely to be reinfected.
3. Read our resources for hacked sites for detailed information on how to fix your website.
4. Request a review in the Security Issues section in Search Console when your entire website is clean and secure. After we check that your site is fixed, we'll remove the "This site may be hacked" message.

Anyone have any experience working with Google to resolve this kind of warning.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Are they reporting all hacked sites in GWT? Found out a client had some malware but Google didn't put a message up about it on our SERP's or in GWT?

Maybe they just didn't know it was there. Hard to imagine though because I was able to find it.

 

[Greg Schueler]

Are they reporting all hacked sites in GWT? Found out a client had some malware but Google didn't put a message up about it on our SERP's or in GWT?

Maybe they just didn't know it was there. Hard to imagine though because I was able to find it.

I think Google only notices the aggressive/harmful malware on sites, like the kind that will try to attack/infect visitors to the hacked site.

The spam page version just adds hundreds/thousands of pages to get backlinks, but no visitors to the regular site get attacked, nor do they see the spammy pages. These hacks just hide in plain site and no one notices. (Though the new Google update may start noticing these).

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I think Google only notices the aggressive/harmful malware on sites, like the kind that will try to attack/infect visitors to the hacked site.

The spam page version just adds hundreds/thousands of pages to get backlinks, but no visitors to the regular site get attacked, nor do they see the spammy pages. These hacks just hide in plain site and no one notices. (Though the new Google update may start noticing these).

Right, I was just curious if they are letting people know through GWT about everything they find out. Or are they popping people in the SERPS for issues they're not warning them about?

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Thanks for posting this @dustybones - applies to a client I'm working with now.
Her site constantly being hacked and for some reason I don't yet understand, she doesn't want to invest in any form of security. Knowing Google is seeing this as enough of a problem to put into the algo gives me a little bit of comfort knowing I'm not battling this on my own.

Would be amusing to put up a poll and find out how many of us in this forum are trying to deal with the same issue!