HeaderBlock Spam Links

  • I just upgraded to 2.3.3 and I received an email from Google telling me that they are dropping my indexing because of spam links and words. I checked my page source and sure enough, they spam got me..
    It is as shown…
    <div id=”headerblock”>
    <center>
    <div style=”left: -2227px; position: absolute; top: -3337px”>
    *****TONS OF SPAM LINKS*******
    </div><img src=”wp-content/themes/journalized-blue/images/title.jpg”>

    I checked my theme and my files, I cannot fine the links that are in the page source above. Any ideas how i can get rid of the spam links to have Google back indexing my sight again?
    Thanks!
    Tim

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)

  • Any ideas how i can get rid of the spam links to have Google back indexing my sight again?

    you get rid of them by finding them, and removing them. There is no magic wand.

    You look through all of your theme files. Then you look through the rest of the files, including plugins. Content like this is a result of a changed file or files — so you find them/it and fix.

    Thread Starter surfbits

    (@surfbits)

    Thank you for your helpful reply.
    I checked in the files that I would think would have the links in, but I have not found them. Since they are in the headerblock section of the source, does anyone have an idea where they might have been placed and what might have been placed there?

    Look, thats your first mistake, stop thinking and start doing. Where you think they ought to be doesnt necessarily mean thats where they are.

    Ive only answered 5 dozen threads like this in 3 years — I must not know anything?

    You want a simple solution; there isnt one. You go through ALL the theme files. How do you know that someone didnt add something somewhere in a file that makes a simple call to meta_head()???

    You dont.

    Go through ALL of your theme files.
    Go through all of your plugins.
    Look inside wp-blog-header.php
    Look inside wp-config.php

    If you need to, download ALL of the files, put them in a folder, go download wingrep, and do a mass search.

    Thread Starter surfbits

    (@surfbits)

    That’s what I am asking for, do I just look for that https://spam link URL, or can they use something else that I need to watch for? meta_head()??? is something I’m not familiar with, so that’s what I’m asking. What should I be looking for?

    No-one can tell you that.. they might be using javascript.. you have to be on the look out for anything unusual

    If you download and zip up ALL of your files, every single one of them, I will go through them.

    Btw, the blog in your profile needs to be upgraded.

    my email is whoo AT whoo.org

    Thread Starter surfbits

    (@surfbits)

    I removed this line in my index.php file in my themes and the spam links have seemed to disappear.

    <?php $wp_headers() ?>

    Does that make sense or am I missing something obvious?
    Thank you very much for you kind offer and I will make the changes in my blog profile ASAP.

    thats not the way to fix it no.. that just means they are adding them using that a call to your header either through meta_head or something else.

    did you actually look inside your header.php?

    Thread Starter surfbits

    (@surfbits)

    Yes, here is the header.php from the themes…

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”&gt;
    <html xmlns=”https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”&gt;

    <head profile=”https://gmpg.org/xfn/11″&gt;
    <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=<?php bloginfo(‘charset’); ?>” />

    <title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

    <meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>” /> <!– leave this for stats –>

    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?>” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

    <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” />
    <link rel=”alternate” type=”text/xml” title=”RSS .92″ href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss_url’); ?>” />
    <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom 0.3″ href=”<?php bloginfo(‘atom_url’); ?>” />
    <link rel=”pingback” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘pingback_url’); ?>” />
    <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”https://www.macreviewcast.com/favicon.ico”&gt;

    <?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly&format=link’); ?>
    <?php wp_head(); ?>

    </head>

    great.

    zip up your files.. send them to me.. Im on my way to work, but I can look at them there.

    This happened to my site too. It turns out the problem was in the database. Look at the wp_options table under blog_headers. The spammer added some base 64 code that added in the spam links here. Delete this code, and you’ll be good to go.

    Hope that helps,
    Trisha

    this was resolved a week ago.

    Thank you **so much** Trisha!!! Obviously if the spam links were in the database (as mine were), no amount of searching the config files would have found them (although I have found & removed links in my config files previously). I have shell access to my files and searched them with recursive grep (several times!) without finding a thing. Your tip to check my database entries, however, saved the day.

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
  • The topic ‘HeaderBlock Spam Links’ is closed to new replies.