Today, Google Search i.e. presence in Google search results seems to be the main, even critical element of a website’s existence. You want your website to be present and to have a good reputation and to indicate what your website is about.
Having it hacked can cause significant issues in that field, which is possibly most evident in cases of URL or content injections.
We have already talked about this topic at some length – in short, in case your website was hacked so that content and/or URLs were injected into your website this will result in your website being misrepresented in Google search results. Your website will in case you have opened it in the browser look perfectly fine, but search results will contain links to pages you did not create with dodgy-looking content. That content can vary from various sales of designer goods, pharmaceutical products, pornography, etc.
How to amend search results?
The first thing as always is to make sure your website is clean i.e. that all that content is actually gone from your website. Here is where OneHourSiteFix can help you!
The next step is to activate your Google Search Console (previously known as the Google Webmaster tool).
You can then confirm that your website is indeed all good by using their option “Inspect any URL….”
Use it to check regular pages on your website, but especially ones you see showing up in Google Search results with faulty content.
The key to understand is that this will return a page Google has in its index and not the real i.e. current page state. You will likely still see unwanted content. Thus as the next step when you have fetched the page, use their option TEST LIVE URL. This will return the page in its most recent form.
Once you have confirmed that the content is indeed removed from the website it is time to arm yourself with patience and take the following steps:
1/ Request indexing via Search Console
2/ Check your robots.txt to make sure it is not blocking any relevant elements of the website
3/ Make sure XML sitemap is up to date and does not contain any injected URLs
Once these actions are completed, Google will still take its time to remove faulty URLs and content from their Search Index, but these steps will somewhat speed up the procedure.
Do expect an increase of 404s reported for your website, which is, in this case, a good thing as it will mean that Google will indeed remove these from Search results.
We discourage placing 301 or 302 redirects for these pages as Google will likely misinterpret them and keep the faulty content longer in its Search results.
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