Site was infected with spam webmaster tools still reporting it

[smcmark]

I have recently been working with a site that was hacked.  It suffered from a pharma injection into Joomla.  The site has been cleaned for several months, but WMT is still reporting "pharmacy" as occuring 421 times.  The url it gives reports a 500 error.  I also removed it in Google.  Can this still be hurting the site?  How can I clean this up?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi John,

Overall my experience is that Google Webmaster Tools is sometimes really slow with refreshing the data and mostly when your problems occurred a couple of months ago. You could try to mark the items as fixed in GWT, this sometimes makes it easier to see new errors.

Hope this helps!

[KillAccountPlease]

Hi John,

I agree with Martijn. A client's website suffered from Malware infection a couple of weeks ago. As a result GWT reported a Malware infection on the site aswell as all search results on Google are marked with a note that this website is infected.

After I cleaned the website up, I went back to GWT and clicked on the error message. I marked all errors as fixed. This tells Google to check your website ASAP. Just fyi: ASAP is in this case a definition which can't be precise as it's up to Google.

Anyway, I think the reason why it takes so long for you ould be:

1. You still have infected files. Make sure your website is really clean!
2. Your website is clean by the crawling algorythm is very long so it takes ages until you get rid of the error message. Best solution here: Mark your errors as fixed.

Hope this makes it for you.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi John,

Question: When you say WMT reports 421 instances of "pharmacy" - where do they report this? In your inbound anchor text, content keywords, or somewhere else?

Also, does Google report any malware on your site? I couldn't tell from the question.

Regardless, if you're unsure about any lingering hack, I'd use a tool like Securi to do a site check. If you're site is indeed clean, I wouldn't worry too much about the latent data in Webmaster Tools. But if you're site was infected for a long time, you can try filing a reconsideration request which might prompt a set of human Google eyeballs on the site. If you site is clean, you can also perform a "crawl as google" and submit all linked pages to the index.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.