Last month my WordPress blog was the victim of a spam injection attack. I am the art director for a highly rated graphic design and website design company. I have years of experience in website design, WordPress Blog Design and I am security minded in my approach to web development – I was still a victim of clever hacking. It can happen to anyone and it is happening at an increasingly alarming rate. The worst part about this experience was that not only my WordPress blog was attacked – my entire corporate website was removed from Google SERPS. We were ranked in the Google Top 10 for several coveted spots such as; graphic design company, packaging design companies, brand identity company, and many more. Our site was completely out of Google search results for two weeks in which time we lost countless leads. This experience absolutely sickened me! It also created way too many hours of work dedicated to repairing the hackers damage and recovering our website’s Google Rankings. During my research into fixing the spam injection hackers damage I discovered that this is a widespread problem with WordPress blogs. It’s happening to thousands of people and it is not limited to people using older versions of WordPress.
Recovering from a WordPress Spam Injection attack is not fun, but you can regain your Google Website Rankings after being hacked by a spam injection attack. If you’ve been compromised, hopefully you have your website and WordPress blog backed up. It can be a pretty tedious process to go through every file and folder on your server locating and deleting spam files. I recommend backing up your WordPress posts and completely removing all files and databases from your server. Then do a complete fresh upload of your website and a complete reinstall of WordPress.
If you have already been removed from Google Search Results then you will want to notify Google immediately of what has happened. The best policy with Google is to be specific in your explanations. You will need to make sure that you have removed all bad files from your server and then contact Google again explaining what actions you have taken to resolve the situation and submit your “request for reconsideration”. In most cases where a valid site has been hacked Google will restore their sites rankings within two weeks. However, don’t expect any notifications from Google on their progress of reevaluating your website or WordPress blog. I am writing this article in hopes that it will help anyone from having to go through that processs.
What should you look for if you suspect a WordPress Spam Injection Attack?
The first thing you should look for is a list of spammy keywords showing up in your list of keywords located in your Google Webmasters Tools. If you aren’t using Google Webmaster Tools then you should definitely look into this. When your site starts showing up in weird looking search results, which can also be seen in Google Webmaster Tools under search results for your site, you need to act fast because at this point Google will act fast to remove your site from SERPS in order to protect others who may be at risk from visiting your website. 2 shot molding