WordPress spam links and SEO spam hack: finding and removing injected content
Your own pages look normal, but Google shows casino, pharmacy or Japanese-language results under your domain. SEO spam uses your site's reputation to rank someone else's content, and it is designed to stay hidden from you.
SEO spam cleanup is part of our malware cleanup, from $199.
The kinds of spam we see
Casino and gambling spam
Pages and links promoting online casinos and betting sites. See the casino and pharmacy cleanup guide.
Cleanup guide →Pharmaceutical spam
Pages selling or promoting prescription drugs, often with product names in titles and URLs.
Japanese keyword spam
Thousands of generated pages in Japanese, often selling counterfeit goods, indexed under your domain.
Hidden links
Links to other sites placed in your pages in a way visitors can't see but search engines can.
Injected pages
Pages or posts that don't exist in your dashboard, generated on the fly by code.
Malicious sitemap entries
A sitemap that lists spam URLs, or an extra sitemap submitted, to get the spam indexed faster.
How we remove SEO spam, and what happens after
Find what search engines see
We compare what crawlers and normal visitors are served, and check which spam URLs are indexed.
Remove the generator
The code creating the pages and links, in files, database and server rules, plus any backdoor that restores it.
Clean the database
Spam posts, options, widgets and injected links in content.
Fix the sitemap and robots rules
Make sure only legitimate pages are listed and that no spam sitemap remains.
Close the entry point
Find and fix how the site was compromised and rotate credentials.
Post-cleanup recovery
Guidance on getting the spam out of Google and monitoring afterwards. See removing spam pages from Google after a hack.
SEO spam FAQ
Why are there spam pages if my site looks normal?
They are often served only to search engines (cloaking) or generated on request, so they don't show up in your dashboard or when you browse the site.
How long until the spam disappears from Google?
It depends on how many URLs are indexed and how often Google re-crawls them. Cleaning the site first and then using Search Console correctly speeds it up. We can't promise a date.
Will my rankings come back?
Often they recover after the spam is gone and the site is re-crawled, but no one can guarantee a specific outcome.
Tell us about your site
Send a short message: your website, what you're seeing, and who hosts it. We'll get back to you with next steps.