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On my site: www someone hacked into my website and now it's displaying wrong Meta description on Google search results. I've verified this using "view source" that meta description and keywords are correct but whenever I search for "faith....." on Google or Bing it shows wrong description. What gives?

EDIT: I know it's been compromised because someone put JavaScript code in my index page which redirected a visitor to a shoe store whenever someone hit my site (I've already removed that script). However, the description in Google still shows up incorrect and it's been like this for the past month.

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  • How you are saying that someone hijacked your website and thats the reason for wrong meta description is Google search result? Apr 22, 2014 at 6:44
  • "what gives?" Well, exactly what you just said... Google only did their job.
    – Martijn
    Apr 22, 2014 at 7:10

4 Answers 4

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You haven't fully cleaned your site. Google is still seeing the hacked version of your home page.

I identified this two ways.

  1. If you view the Google cache of your home page, you will still the hacked page. You can do this by clicking the small green triangle next the the home page URL in Google SERPS, then clicking 'cached'. The date of the cached page is 17 Apr 2014, so Google is still seeing the hacked page.

  2. Just to double check how Google is viewing the page I used Screaming Frog site crawler which has an option in the configuration option to change the user agent. I switched it to Google Bot and crawled your home page and can confirm when Google hits your home page, it sees a different page as the user does.

You need to fix your site again and ensure it is completely cleaned.

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  • Would that be because of cache-headers, or some other reason? Apr 22, 2014 at 9:26
  • What would I be looking for? where? It's hosted on microsoft server.
    – Shane Km
    Apr 22, 2014 at 9:38
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    Sometimes there's a hidden script (hidden = converted to a type of encoding that doesn't read with the naked eye) in the page's code that reads the user agent and causes a different page to display to that user agent. You'll have to scour the entire page and looking for areas that don't look correct.
    – JMC
    Apr 22, 2014 at 15:36
  • Also check your .htaccess and other server configuration files. Apr 23, 2014 at 8:34
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If it was 'hacked' and you changed it back, it will take time to be updated in search results.

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  • it's been like this for over a month and didn't change
    – Shane Km
    Apr 22, 2014 at 7:47
  • @Shane Km: depending if your site is often crawled by Googlebot.
    – Zistoloen
    Apr 22, 2014 at 8:51
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You must release the website cache, remove your cookies, logout from your google accounts and search again and see if it's changed.

Anyway it takes time to reindex your pages with your meta tags.

You sould carefully search trought all files and see suspicious codes / scripts.

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You can change it back if it was hijacked, but it will take time to reflect on google search, I will recommend using google webmaster tool to hasten it using google fetch-as and try adding some security measures to prevent reoccurrence in future.

you should add some php injection filters, website phishing and cross-site scripting filters to prevent external script execution. There's also an option of using WAF Protection on your server.

Do some research about these I mentioned and hope it helps.

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