Help with spam indexed pages GSC

  • My site was hacked with that spam with japanese words. Apparently, it’s now good and Wordfence, Google Search Console, Sucuri and other scans don’t return anything negative. But I’m not sure about that because the pages are still indexed in GSC and appearing on Google Search. All the pages are returning the 404 error even when I ask GSC to inspect the URL. I’ve read a lot about this subject and I’ve read that hackers can mask the real page with the 404 error, my question is: If the pages are 404 in the GSC Inspect URL Tool, does that mean that they’re really gone? And now it’s a matter of time for Google to remove them? The number of indexed pages were decreasing day by day, but suddenly GSC indexed a lot of them again. What could that mean? Also, the spam pages aren’t crawled since January, I wish they were because them Google could know that they’re off and remove it from the website searches. Maybe I can change that in my robots.txt file? I think the hacker edited it, because there was an unknown sitemap there. I removed it, but I don’t know if something is missing for Google to crawl the pages again. I know that’s a frequently asked topic, but I can’t find that specific answer, I would appreciate very much if somebody help me. Thanks in advance!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Your robots.txt file isn’t blocking anything. The sitemap currently referred to is auto-generated by Yoast so it’ll accurately reflect your current site’s content.

    If search results are showing stale content which you’ve removed or corrected, you could try using the Remove Outdated Content tool.

    Thread Starter thiagoalves2332

    (@thiagoalves2332)

    Thank you for answering! Remove outdated content would be a great solution if I could send several URLs, but it only allows me to send one by one. Since I’m currently with 84,900 spammy URLs indexed, I wouldn’t be able to do it. My concern is: The number of indexed pages were decreasing a lot but, a few days ago, thousands of spam pages were reindexed again. I don’t know why is that or what that means. Also, the current number of non-indexed pages in my GSC is 505,000, all of them being spam pages.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    It sounds to me like the hack was not fully cleaned and you may have been reinfected. It’s not unheard of for spam pages to be hidden from everyone and common detection tools and only visible to Google and other popular search engines. There used to be a “fetch as Google tool” that was useful in exposing this technique, but it’s no longer available AFAICT.

    You could try temporarily changing your browser’s user agent string to match that of Googlebot. Do a search to learn what it is and how to change it on your specific browser. Then you might look like Googlebot to the hack code. This is only effective if the hack code is checking user agents. If it’s confirming the remote IP is within Google’s IP range, there’s little you can do to fool it.

    There are some other tips on what you can do in this FAQ.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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