Bizarre SEO Problems and Sketchy Code

  • My blog has recently suffered a huge hit in search rankings, and long story short the best I can figure out is that the home page is no longer being indexed by Google. Individual posts are still being indexed.

    I haven’t been able to come up with a clear diagnosis, but there are some weird symptoms I’ve uncovered.

    The site is https://www.radiodramarevival.com.

    The homepage cache, in Google, only shows the first post. For subsequent posts, only the headline of a post is shown.

    This link might work? Google Cache: Radiodramarevival.com

    On top of that, I used the seo-browser.com tool. And see some REALLY questionable code appear in between all of my blog entries, like, links to:

    “Buy Seroquel C.O.D Buy Seroquel Online Buy Seroquel Without Prescription Buy Seroquel No Rx Buy Seroquel Overnight Delivery Order Seroquel Order Seroquel Online Order Seroquel Without Prescription Order Seroquel No Rx Order Seroquel Overnight Delivery Order Seroquel COD Order Seroquel C.O.D Cheap Seroquel Cheap Seroquel Online Cheap Seroquel Without Prescription Cheap Seroquel No Rx Cheap Seroquel Overnight Delivery Cheap Seroquel COD” – etc etc etc nasty stuff

    Weird thing is, if I “view source” in my code, this junk is NOWHERE to be seen.

    Results from SEO Browser: https://www.seo-browser.com/results.php?user_agent=1&address=https://www.radiodramarevival.com/&action=Parse+URL

    This thing is driving me crazy. Is something injecting this nasty code where I can’t see it but Google does? The site has suffered a hack before (one of those nasty iframe things) – that issues seems to resolved, and messing with the theme causes no effect on the results of the SEO browser test.

    Appreciate any ideas people have!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Did you really clean up after the hack? You still have hack code in your database, and I can’t see what verison of wordpress you’re running. If you’re running less than 2.8.5, yoiu’re still vulnerable, regardless if you cleaned your database. How to Completely Clean a Hacked WordPress Install

    Thread Starter finalrune

    (@finalrune)

    Yum, yum.

    I dug around a little deeper based on your suggestion and came across this article which summarized my experience nicely: https://linux.byexamples.com/archives/397/wordpress-exploit-we-been-hit-by-hidden-spam-link-injection/

    Sure enough, there was a internal_links_cache stashed in wp_options that was injecting the nasty links. Removing that got rid of the nasty links.

    I’m still experiencing a weird symptom where only the 1st post in the loop is being displayed to Google (the others appear just as headlines only), also, a bunch of ? characters just appeared all through my posts and I’m not quite sure why…

    Thread Starter finalrune

    (@finalrune)

    Should note – I also completely rebuilt WordPress per article suggestion, fresh install of 2.8.5, new plugins, fresh theme, etc.

    Glad you got it working OK. That’s an interesting link about spam injection.

    Only the 1st post in google; you mean in google search results?

    Search RegEx is a good plugin to be able to search and replace with Grep through all posts and pages to maybe get rid of the funny characters, but I don’t see any from here.

    WP Exploit Scanner seems to work well to check on WP security.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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