SEO spam in the sitemap: the sign a site has been hacked
SEO spam keeps the site online and rarely touches the home page. You spot it from hundreds of new URLs in the sitemap, put there to feed off the site's rankings.
You see the normal site, Google sees the spam.
The "Japanese keyword hack" and its variants create thousands of pages about pharma, casinos or loans. Search engines see them, visitors often don't.
By the time your client notices the drop in traffic, Google has already indexed the spam.
Sitemap and robots.txt, checked every day.
Reading
Every day we read the site's sitemap and robots.txt.
Analysis
We look for sudden URL growth, links to other domains, typical spam words and rules that block search engines.
Alert
The alert includes some suspicious URLs, so you can check in a moment.
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Start free trialFrequently asked questions
What is the Japanese keyword hack?
An infection that creates thousands of pages in Japanese or full of commercial spam, to feed off the site's rankings. It shows up in the sitemap and in Google's results.
Does this check need the plugin?
No, sitemaps and robots.txt are public. The plugin adds file checks and the comparison from inside the site.
Goes well with
- Cloaking detection: the page Googlebot gets compared with the one visitors getGooglebot, a visitor from Google and mobile compared, with an AI opinion.
- Blacklist monitoring: Google, Spamhaus and the restGoogle Web Risk, Spamhaus DBL and ZEN, SURBL, SpamCop.
- PHP malware in the uploads folder: how to find it quicklyPHP in uploads, including names like .php.jpg, and suspicious files.
- WordPress core file integrity checksEvery file compared with the official checksums, with the changed lines.
Try it on your clients' sites.
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