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It was brought to my attention that if you search for the name of one of our directors (with the intent to find there profile page on our site) They come up as the first link in most search engines as you would expect but the link text is just pure spam.

the three search string I have tested on Google, Bing, Ask, and Yahoo have all returned similar results.

Here is a list of the search strings:

Paolo rossi futex

Mark rossi futex

Marco rossi futex

Dan Goldberg futex

Any idea what might be causing this I have searched through as much of the sites code as I can and cant find anything wrong with it.

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  • Use Google Webmaster Tools to see how Google views your site. From somewhere, those spam words are being injected into your page. Do you advertise at all? Copy part of the text from the search engines, view your page then Right Click -> View Source (Or Page Source, etc), then Ctrl + F and search your page for that text. Jul 6, 2012 at 7:45
  • Ok so I think I found the problem and have removed some hidden links that were in one of the word press files, but the results are still the same is there a way to force Google and others to update or will I just have to wait till the next time the bots pass?
    – Alex L
    Jul 6, 2012 at 8:03
  • Submitting a sitemap or "fetch page as Googlebot" will help to speed up the process. Just for curiosity, what exactly caused this?
    – milo5b
    Jul 6, 2012 at 8:15
  • There were some links to pharmaceutical websites in a div with display none in the footer of the WP theme we use, I am trying to work out how they got there but have come up blank. If you would like feel free to add an answer so I can accept it.
    – Alex L
    Jul 6, 2012 at 8:38
  • Usually things like this are caused by hackers exploiting WP bugs or bad filesystem permissions. Did you update to the last version of WP after cleaning that footer?
    – milo5b
    Jul 6, 2012 at 10:03

1 Answer 1

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As @Alex figured out, the issues were caused by a hidden link in the WP theme footer.

In order to have the changes reflected in Google (Or other search engines), request to have the site recrawlled and it should be changed in a few days to a week.

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