Site links show spam

[ChristopherM]

Hi folks,

I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al.

I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware.

I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process?

Thank you

[matbennett]

It'll get there in it's own time.  However a few fresh links & a bit of new front page content never harms the crawl rate.

[ChristopherM]

Thanks Mat,

Exactly what I told the owner of the website, guess I'll have to see how he responds. Hopefully this will get cleaned up quickly

[MarieHaynes]

You can change/delete sitelinks in your Webmaster Tools.

[ChristopherM]

I was under the impression that you could only demote links, not actually change them? Strangely enough, for some reason I recall being able to see the active site links in Webmaster Tools, but when I check for this site, it only gives the option to demote?

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Christopher...perhaps I am misunderstanding the question, but I would think that you could just demote all of the sitelinks that are spammy.  Then Google will replace them with appropriate ones.

[ChristopherM]

Hi Marie,

Yes, alright so when I search for the brand name in Google, it shows 6 site links as per usual. However, these site links have names such as Viagra, Spam, Spam, but their URL links are actual links on the website for proper content! So, the malware that got into the site managed to make use of proper URLs on the site, but change the title tags per say.

Does that make sense? So I don't want to demote links that are there, I just want to remove the bad title tags..

[MarieHaynes]

Ah, I see what you mean!  I thought you meant there were spam pages on your site that were appearing on the sitelinks.

I see, in my webmaster tools that there is a button to "remove demotion", so you could possibly still demote these urls so they don't appear on your sitelinks.  Then, once Google has recrawled them remove the demotion and they should appear as normal.

[ChristopherM]

Yeh, I could do that, but through other websites I noticed that it says it'll take effect only from November!

Anyway, sounds like I've done what I can and hopefully Google will crawl the website again soon and re-index appropriately