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I have a strange problem. I have read about this problem in other questions but mine is different in a strange way. After a back up at my web hosting company, Google indexes my website with tags such as "CCNA EXAM, Prepare for the exam, CCNET".

My website has ABSOLUTELY NO AFFILIATION TO ANY COURSES AT ALL.

It an NGO dedicated to helping poor children. I am desperate and I do not know how to force google to index my title properly.

My website is www.cys.ro, the title is "homepage - Asociatia Create Yourself"

If you search on google the title is completey different although with other web sniffing tools the HTTP HEADERS are correct.

What can I do?

I already submitted re-indexing to google four times.

EDIT: The while site viewed by google is different. All other crawlers, browsers and proxies view the correct site, but google views a different site which actually contains our name in it in a phrase "thousands of professionals study with cys.ro". It is an automated generated site with our name in it and it actually tricks google into reading the fake site.

This is the text in the description "of interested professionals can touch the destination of success in exams". There are other websites that have this problem from what i see. Is it possible to be a hacker?

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  • I already submitted re-indexing to google four times. This is not immediate. It will often take 1-2 days for the regular googlebot to visit your page and make the Submit to Index official. I am not sure when you did this last, however, it can take some time for things to change. For the record, Google makes mistakes sometimes. One question would be, are you on shared hosting? Sometimes if the web server does not have the web site configured it will show the first site on the server. If could have been a glitch when Google visited last. Who knows? It is just a guess why the mistake was made.
    – closetnoc
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:01
  • @closetnoc After I submitted the request I viewed a preview and it was with the WRONG TITLE AND DESCRIPTION
    – yoyo_fun
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:05
  • Google may be seeing the wrong site. Did the preview image appear right or wrong? Also, how old is the site? I assume old enough that DNS has propagated properly. It can take 24-72 hours for DNS to propagate properly.
    – closetnoc
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:08
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    Ah Ha! Hacked WP sites can be tough. I am not at all familiar with WP since I roll my own in notepad. What do you expect from someone so old?? Make sure your code is all up to date including WP, themes, and plug-ins. All of these can be hacked. Check them ALL for known vulnerabilities here: web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?execution=e2s1 Change passwords immediately yourself and not at login. Run an anti-virus since WP can be manipulated outside of WP. If on shared hosting, a vulnerable site can effect other sites. Sometimes it can be another site that was hacked effecting yours.
    – closetnoc
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:19
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    @closetnoc, all good advice. There are also specialized WordPress plugins that will attempt to detect modified core files or recently created files in the core directories (neither of which should be there in a normal install) and also companies that specialize in cleaning up hacked WordPress sites.
    – JCL1178
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:26

3 Answers 3

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If your site shows Google what is basically advertising content that is unrelated to the actual site, you've been hacked. If you have enough knowledge of WordPress and also server security to detect and clean the hack, go for it. If you are at all uncertain about how to do this, hire a professional security service to do it for you such as Sucuri or WordFence. Both of the those services will clean a hacked site, harden it, and provide a plugin for WordPress that will help keep you safe going forward.

However, if you are hosting on a less-than-optimal shared hosting ISP and other security holes are affecting you, move to new hosting ASAP. There's lots of affordable hosting out there that has decent to excellent security, including some specialized hosting for WordPress.

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  • I have some theoretical knowledge about security (symmetric, asymmetrical encryption algorithms, block ciphers, hashing, Fermat small theorem, salting and every other thing studied at university). Unfortunately they did not teach us about these type of problems and I never met this problem. Can you guide me in solving this problem or suggest some materials? BTW I am taking care of this site. It is not my site and not my NGO per se.
    – yoyo_fun
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:28
  • Start with plugins. Better WP Security and WordFence are free and might help. But given what you say above, your knowledge is theoretical and also not applicable to this kind of hack. Hire WordFence or Sucuri to clean up the mess.
    – JCL1178
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:32
  • I would like to try to solve this issue myself. I I managed to pass my cryptography exam i could probably manage this as well. I can manually edit the php files and I have access to the ftp. But I do not know where to start.
    – yoyo_fun
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:34
  • This isn't a cryptography issue. You need to find the modified file(s) and remove injected the injected code and then determine how the hackers were able to do this in the first place. So review server logs, do greps looking for recently modified files, check the database for injected code, do the same for JS files, etc. You can Google for more info. blog.sucuri.net/2010/02/…
    – JCL1178
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:39
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...with other web sniffing tools the HTTP HEADERS are correct.

Tell the programmers of those web sniffing tools that they need to reprogram those tools because I looked at the HTML source code of your page and things need changing.

What can I do?

Stop confusing the robots.

I look at your code and you have TWO title tags as follows separated by other HTML code:

<title>Asociatia Create Yourself</title>

<title>homepage - Asociatia Create Yourself</title>

No one is 100% sure what title you really want to display, and luckily my browser did not crash over it. Google probably made a guess of what title to display based on content it found in your code.

What you need to do is eliminate one of the title tags.

As a side note, you should try to consolidate your external resources. This means try to put them together if you can and load fewer resources to display the page. The page will run faster if that happens since less requests per user are made to the server. This can be observed when running the page in webpagetest.org.

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1
  • I added the second title today in a different php file that loads for every page in a desperate attempt to fix something. It does not make any difference.
    – yoyo_fun
    Jun 28, 2016 at 19:39
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I suggest you add meta title and meta description for every page. It will give you more control over what is displayed in SERP.

Sometimes Google will alter your titles and descriptions but having those meta tags should help.

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3
  • I had done this with the YOAST plugin. In the Yoast there were even snippets of the google indexing and it displayed correctly. The website is made in Wordpress.
    – yoyo_fun
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:00
  • I am not seeing any yoast code on your pages.
    – dasickle
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:00
  • I disabled it trying to solve the problem. Will enable in 10 seconds. DONE
    – yoyo_fun
    Jun 28, 2016 at 17:03

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