Recovering from spam links on MY site

[yon23]

Hey guys,

Having a weird situation and wondering if anybody can help. I run a sizable WordPress site with a number of content writers. One of the writer's accounts was hacked and was used to post several dozens of complete spam posts with spun content and links to all sorts of shady sites.

Recently the site has begun losing rankings on all sorts of pages. There's no manual penalty or anything, but I'm concerned that we're being penalized for having had these links on the site. Of course, as soon as we found the content, we immediately removed it, reset passwords, etc. But a decent number of the pages were indexed.

Does anybody have any experience with this or ideas of what to do about it? Is there somewhere we can talk to Google about it or some way to show that we are not part of bad neighborhoods?

Thanks so much for any thoughts,

Yon

[BlueprintMarketing]

I would check the site for malware most of the time people hack sites and leave much more than just spun content.

You can check it out by using https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/

To keep this from happening in the future, I have provided security information URLs at the bottom of the reply. What security measures have you taken to determine that there is no malicious code causing this?

What security measures have you taken to determine that there is no malicious code causing this?

** What do your backlinks look like ( I know they sent external links from your site out with the spam content I'm talking about links going to your site) did they link to you as well?**

Regarding speaking to Google, there are methods of letting them know you don't want to show certain content on specific URLs as well as telling them that content is outdated. Unfortunately, there is not a  one click fix for what you're dealing with.

You can remove the URLs from Google as long as they're not being used for something helpful now by going to the first URL below. The URLS below will help you with the spamming external links

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en

You can also communicate to Google that this content outdated through this method.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6349986?hl=en

My best advice to you is doing a complete SEO audit as well as a security audit and prevent this stuff from happening in the future.

Use tools like Moz, DeepCawl, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush etc. To keep tabs on all the fundamentals on your site.

Keeping this from happening in the future

if you want your site checked for malware every four hours and to have it removed you can add

• https://sucuri.net/website-antivirus/signup
• https://www.armor.com/security-solutions/armor-anywhere/

** for blocking malware and keeping this from happening in the future**

• https://www.incapsula.com/
• https://www.armor.com/security-solutions/armor-anywhere/
• https://www.stackpath.com/web-application-firewall/
• https://sucuri.net/website-firewall/

This will help prevent attacks like this from occurring by whitelisting IP addresses or using double authentication across the board you will be able to minimize the chance this happening again.

To understand exactly what the problem is I would need to know the domain name as well as a bit more information. I hope what I've given you is helpful.

I would be happy to take a quick look at your site you feel comfortable posting your domain, please post it if you do not you can send it to me via private message.

I hope this is of help,

Thomas