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A couple of weeks ago my WordPress site suffered a conditional redirection hack:

While I can browse my website without any problem, my Home appears in the Google Search results with spam data, the title and description of my Home shows spam products and this kind of things that have nothing to do with my real content.

After reading about this kind of hack I've made this:

  • Pass a security scanner to my website.
  • Check manually every website file (its name) and my database content.
  • Talk with my hosting admin to check this thing.
  • Use the Google Search console Url inspector.
  • Write to Google Search Support.

The results of this investigation was that my website had a very suspicious folder with a .htaccess and a jquery file not related with my site inside this folder.

So I deleted the folder, temporary removed the CNAME * for my DNS (suggested by my hosting admins), repeated the investigation process and requested Google to re-index my site.

Now it seems that everything is clean, none suspicious .htaccess (my .htaccess is a very standard WordPress file), security scanners seem to see everything ok... but it has been 3 days since the indexing request and Google Search results (and Url inspector) are still wrong (they are still showing the spam products). So, should I wait more days for this re-index? Is there anything else that I could try or check to fix this?

EDIT: Finally, after 4 days, Google reindexed my site, but unfortunately the problem still persists, my Home page is indexed as a search engine of spam products.

I've checked again the web and I can't see any other .htaccess, in my database I can't see anything related with this...what could I check?

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  • Did the hack result in a bunch of spam pages having been created?
    – Mike Ciffone
    Commented Jan 23, 2022 at 18:17
  • No, it seems that the hack is a redirection to spam pages for search engines crawlers. My site seems correct and users can navigate without any problem.
    – Wonton
    Commented Jan 23, 2022 at 19:28
  • Over the past year in particular I've had multiple sites that when I check access logs I see a steady stream ofGET requests from legit googlebot/bingbot for obscure pdfs e.g. appliance manuals, car parts info, electronic components, etc. Here's an answer where I described the weird redirect behavior: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/136608/…
    – Mike Ciffone
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 2:01

1 Answer 1

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If your result in the SERPs is what you want to change, you must force Googlebot to crawl it again. For that, use the URL inspection tool, enter your homepage URL and after that, request a (re)indexing.

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  • Yes, I did that 3 days ago, I'm still waiting for the re-index. I guess Google has tons of requests.
    – Wonton
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 9:46
  • In the URL inspection tool, you can check the last time Googlebot crawled your homepage. You must be patient as you did everything correctly.
    – Emirodgar
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 9:56
  • Thanks! I've just seen it. It says January 16th since the last index, so I have to wait.
    – Wonton
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 10:08
  • Submit an rss feed under the sitemaps tab in GSC that includes all of your content. Based on my latest test data G will crawl/index it faster. 67.74% confidence interval - so just shy of +-3.
    – Mike Ciffone
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 2:10

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