How To Cleanup the Google Index After a Website Has Been HACKED

[yoursearchteam]

We have a client whose website was hacked, and some troll created thousands of viagra pages, which were all indexed by Google.  See the screenshot for an example.  The site has been cleaned up completely, but I wanted to know if anyone can weigh in on how we can cleanup the Google index.  Are there extra steps we should take?  So far we have gone into webmaster tools and submitted a new site map.

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[taryn_s]

Hi,

Just to let you know it's quite easy to find the domain of the site in question from the screenshot you provided

I think as you've created a new sitemap and submitted it to Google and removed all the pages so they return 404s, you should be fine. The page will just drop out of the index in time. You might also want to add the address of your XML sitemap to your robots.txt file as it's not there at present.

I crawled the site using Screaming Frog and couldn't see any dodgy looking pages remaining. You could create removal requests of the pages in Webmaster Tools if you'd like to take an extra step. Do this under Google Index > Remove URLs. To prevent this happening again, make sure you keep your WordPress installation and all plugins up to date.

[gowebsol]

If you submitted a new sitemap then you should be fine, but "in case of emergency", you can try listing the individual URL's in Google Webmaster Tools > Google Index > Remove URL's. It's a tedious process, but something else you can try.

Sucks, doesn't it? Wordfence or another WP security plugin is well worth the time to install and monitor. Good luck.

[TheeDigital]

Doesn't have to be so tedious. If you have a list of URLs you can use the bulk removal extension for Chrome found here: https://github.com/noitcudni/google-webmaster-tools-bulk-url-removal

[N1ghteyes]

As has been suggested you can request the removal of pages in GWMT and you should keep any wordpress site and plugins up to date.

To add to this, you might want to look at something like Cloudflare as an extra layer to protect your clients site. We've been using it for a year now and its made a massive difference, both to performance and security.