Attacked with spam links.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Our website was hit with the "Pharma hack", "Google Cloaking Hack", or "Blackhat SEO Spam".  and Google showed in the results this website may be compromised.

After cleaning out the hack from the website I chacked with the Seomoz tool Open Site Explorer and I found that they hacked 1000 of other websites  and created links to my website. They were  building a few 1000 links to the  website with the clickable text "buy cheap online pharmacy". and more like that.

This website www.washington23.com has been hacked and gives over 200 links to your website for pharmacy items.  And Google considers this from your impotent links as i can see in webmasters.

What can I do about it?

[irvingw]

How are your rankings after you removed the hack? has your site returned?

I would reach out to the site owners to let them know they were hacked, a lot of them will figure it out eventually and remove the links but it makes sense to be proactive and tell them their site has viagra links embedded in the code and Google will punish them for this, tell them you noticed it because your site was attacked too so they know you're on their side.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

But there are over 100 websites. This would take weeks.

[irvingw]

If your rankings returned you're probably OK but I would at very least look at the biggest offenders with the highest number of links pointing to you and contact those guys first. Also make sure you changed all of the passwords and updated and security issues to make sure it doesn't get hacked again the same way.

Also, since it's one letter you have to craft you can just use it for all of the emails.I'd follow up at least once though a week later just to remind them.

a) visit the site

b) get the email address and webmasters email

c) paste the letter and shoot out the email

I bet I could do that in one day. it's probably worth it if they're spamming links to you, but it really depends on how important the site is to you. If your companies livelihood depends on the sites health then I would say do it.

The good news is the links don't have any of your real keyword phrases in them so you're probably OK even if you do nothing.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Thanks. The website is very impotent to us.

Can you give me an approach how to write to them?  (My English is bad....)

[irvingw]

Short and sweet - something like this:

Hi,

I am the SEO at mysite.com and I noticed your site was hacked! If you look in the source code of your homepage you can see hidden links to pharma sites in your source code. This can definitely result in your site being completely banned in Google.

I'm telling you this because our site was already banned, and we lost a lot of traffic as a result of this hack. You might want to take a look at your site as well and remove the code. Maybe you already know about your site being hacked, if so you can disregard this email. Thanks, Irving

[kadesmith]

Yosepgr,

First it's important to not spell important as "impotent", especially after Irving's reference to viagra.

Write something like this:

I noticed your website at {put web address here} was linking to mine several hundred times.  I visited your site to see why you liked my site so much and noticed that it's because your website appears to have been hacked.

You should consider cleaning up all of the links the hackers put in to your website so that you do not get a penalty from Google.  You should also consider taking some safety precautions to prevent this from happening in the future.  Some things you can do is check your site to see where SQL Injections may occur.  You might also put in Captcha validations where your users are able to input information/register for your site.

I hope all goes well with your cleanup.

[irvingw]

I like yours better, i was trying to avoid being technical because sometimes the owner gets the email or whatever and it may go over their head.

The important thing is that they are made aware that they have viagra links on their site, and to let whoever handles their website coding know that they have a serious issue to the health and rankings of their site.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Thanks both of you!

Dose anyone have some good tips how to do this all quickly, finding there emails etc it can be a big job.

[irvingw]

Don't sweat it, it will give you something to do or you can probably outsource that real cheap. It's grunt work.

No problem, getting hacked sucks and I want to wring the neck of the person responsible. Feel free to mark as good answer or give us a thumbs up

Visit the site and see if they have a contact us form or email addressmost sites do, only spam sites hide that info because they don't want to be contacted.

you can also go to godaddy.com and check the registrar information and see the email of the person the domain name is registered to if the don't have registration set to private (spam sites usually are domain by proxy private)

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

I will start working on it Sunday and I will come back here to report.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Would you think I should also use the google disavow links tool?