Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi John,

Beside the great points mentioned before these suggestions might help you.

1. I ones saw a few inserted casino / gambling URL’s pop up in a Google Analytics reports. Might be worth your time to check if there are any new URL’s created.
2. Run some security scans on your site to find any vulnerabilities that might have caused the hack.
3. Since you didn’t find it in your database, you could check for any hard coded links with the search through files option in Notepad. If the link is hard coded you should be able to find it.
4. If you are using a CMS like Wordpress, check if all your plugins and themes are up to date. Poor maintenance could have caused the security breach.
5. If your website is hacked, could it be that the hacker changed links to prevent an easy discovery? Might extent your search to more generic spam terms.

As Dirk said, don’t wait too long solving this issue. If you are depending on your SEO and you can’t fix this issue within days I would rather hire an expert then wait a few weeks.

Goodluck!

Hi Justin,

In that case I would ask your developer to make the sitemap on the website update automatically (or generate a new one every day). And submit that link to webmaster tools. If he's a real genius he could add your blog pages from Wordpress to this sitemap aswell but I'm not sure if Wordpress has a hook for this.

Alternative options:

1. Let him make the automatically updated sitemap for the custom part of the website and use this combined with the sitemap from the yoast plugin. You can upload both separated in Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure both got their own URL. In this case it’s all automated and is just as good as the previous method.
2. Keep on updating your sitemap manually. Just make sure you don't use the yoast sitemap and include the blogposts in your sitemap from screaming frog since this would give double input. If you choose to refresh your sitemap manually I would disable the sitemap within the Yoast plugin and use the Screaming frog sitemap which should include your blog pages aswell.

Good luck and let me know if this works for you!

Hi Sumit Vyas,

To understand the new spam score I suggest you read:

http://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk

and

http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday

Moz checks a website on 17 points that they found are correlating to getting penalized by Google. A spam score of 5 tells you that 11,4% of website’s that do trigger 5 of any of those flags are penalized. The score doesn’t only take backlinks in account but does check on-page signals aswell. I would check the list in the blogpost any see which criteria you meet and consider start working on those. Note: correlation does not mean casualition. If you think it's legit, it porbably is.

Besides that, keep in mind that 88,6% of websites that do trigger 5 flags aren’t penalized!

Hope this helps.

Great to see you found an answer Justin!