I am helping a client figure out some weird URL issue and I am stumped! Google Webmaster tools shows a couple of hundred "pages" that essentially don't exist and look pretty spammy, also using wording that is apparently trademarked. We suspected it was a hack, so we cleaned up the site. But the pages are still showing. Some examples of these naughty-looking URLs:
http://www.example.com/?page=vista-group-payday-loan
http://www.example.com/index.php?page=us-cash-loan.com
The first link came up with a cease and desist from the trademark owner. The rest came from HTML Improvements area in Google Webmasters as "Short Meta Descriptions."
The pages themselves don't show anything malicious, in fact it just shows the website's home page. The site is built in Wordpress and the pages don't actually exist. We now suspect this was the work of a previous SEO company. But that's about all I have - I can't figure out WHAT it is (keyword ads? link building?). I'm not an SEO expert and my skills are limited, but I thought perhaps you guys may know what the heck these URLs are, and I need to remove them STAT.