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I'm dealing with a site that was hacked a while back. Google indexed thousands of pages using JAPANESE results. I have used my robots file to disallow everything except the pages that actually exist on my site and used htaccess to create 404s for pages that don't exist.

Google continues to show sitelinks (in JAPANESE) to pages on my site. If I check webmaster tools, there are still thousands of pages indexed and content keywords show mainly JAPANESE terms.

There is no JAPANESE version or text on the website.

What is different about this issue is that google is showing the site link text in JAPANESE and now linking to my top pages that exist. I can't disallow these pages. I also need to change the fact that google has all this foreign info in its index and still contains URLs that don't exist on the site.

The snippets served by google all return a 404 but they are still in the index.

How are they still indexing this content?

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    Possible duplicate of Site was hacked, need to remove all URLs starting with + from Google, use robots.txt?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 13:22
  • Basically, you shouldn't be blocking these URLs with robots.txt. If you block crawling then Googlebot won't see the 404 and your "hacked" URL remains indexed for much longer. Do your legitimate page URLs follow a specific pattern (eg. all lowercase a to z letters plus hyphen?) then you could serve a 410 Gone for all requests that do not fit that pattern (which will naturally include all Chinese-looking URLs)?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 13:34
  • While Site was hacked, need to remove all URLs starting with + from Google, use robots.txt? is a very similar question, the solutions focus on identifying the URLs that start with +. Those solutions wouldn't be useful in this case. This question isn't close enough to be marked a duplicate.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 14:06
  • Though there is already an accepted answer: there is another http status code 410 'Gone'. This signals that the page is no longer there and will not return
    – Sander_P
    Commented May 29, 2017 at 9:11

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Don't block them from being crawled - this doesn't remove them from the index. It only stops Googlebot from looking at them.

Normally, the fastest way is to use the Search Console removal tool. For the numbers you're talking that doesn't sound possible as they have to be entered one-by-one.

The next fastest in my experience would be to create a sitemap that does an alt language mapping - Sitemaps are crawled and processed very soon after being submitted. If you tell Google each of the bad URIs are Chinese language (rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-Hans") and then put in real URIs as the "en" alternatives - this will replace them in English language engines. You can use the same URI multiple times.

Example:

<url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/bad-chinese-page/</loc>
    <xhtml:link
                 rel="alternate"    
                 hreflang="zh-Hans"    
                 href="http://www.example.com/bad-chinese-page/"    
                 />
    <xhtml:link     
                 rel="alternate"    
                 hreflang="en"    
                 href="http://www.example.com/good-page/"    
                 />
</url>

Make sure each of these pages is returning a 410 error. This doesn't just tell Google the server can't find the content - it categorically says it's no longer there. They'll be dropped faster from the index.

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