Search Console Hacked Site Manual Action Review Still NOT Automated
Update – 20/10/2015 – Google have now removed the hacked content notification from Search Console after 3 days. It didn’t take too long and in the message, all I put was that the sub-domain hosting the so called ‘hacked content’ had been suspended, and that my web host was looking into the reasons why this had been an issue in the first place.
So, I was surprised to find out today that my site has been hacked or more so Google had detected ‘hacked content’ on this very website. Google recently stated that for 2015, the number of hacked sites had increased by 180% and a 300% increase in ‘hacked reconsideration requests’. They’ve been trying to make the process of getting any partial penalties removed easier by automating it, but it seems in my situation I’m still going to have to have my site manually reviewed as they’ve not gone as far as rolling out the automated review yet to everyone and have limited it to beta testing (as of the GWC post I’ve linked to above).
Thanks to Google for spotting this, as I would not have noticed this. I wouldn’t say my site has been compromised, but more the fact that another customer (with my web hosting company) on the same shared server on this website simply created a sub-domain and put up a really spammy website that linked out to pornographic websites. Not what I wanted to hear on a Saturday evening.
Right now my home page is coming up with the ‘This site may be hacked.’ messaging just above my meta description.
I simply contacted my web host to find out what was going on and they’ve now suspended the sub-domain ‘wap.vlexo.net’. I’m also trying to figure out how this even happened and if whether it’s a security flaw on my web hosts side of things.
I’ve submitted a reconsideration request through Google Search Console, so I just need to wait now I suppose:
I explained the situation to Google and exactly what had happened. The is the message that appears once you hit the submit button for the review of your site by someone on Google’s end. It’s a shame that the process is not automated because I’m betting the process that found that bit of apparent ‘hacked’ content is very likely automated. Google’s message, as you can see below, clearly states that ‘This process may take some time’, which clearly isn’t good enough. I mean, imagine if this was large website or a bank that had been hacked — they’d literally have to wait for Google to remove ‘This site has been hacked.’ from the SERPs — even though they had fixed whatever pages were hacked. An automated solution seems ideal – let’s hope their beta testing turns into primary testing. 🙂
Reconsideration Request
I also received this message in Google Search Console after submitting the reconsideration request:
We’ve received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://vlexo.net/
We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can’t reply individually to each request.
It says to allow ‘several weeks for the reconsideration request’. That’s pretty slow IMHO. I’ll post an update on how long it’ll actually take – if I receive anything. Hopefully my immediate response to this hacked message from Google will go a long way in speeding up the process. I don’t think it’ll be resolved this weekend however. 🙂
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