How to fix Japanese Keyword Hacked WordPress Site?
So you see your website traffic drop significantly and you have no idea how? You check your analytics and it seems that your site has been dropping traffic rapidly then you might want to check your site’s search console and you see that your ranking has dropped as well. The reason for this is a hacked website. Specifically, one that has been infected with malware and has submitted another sitemap or redirected your site results to another website through link cloaking. As worrying as it may seem this is pretty common for sites that have outdated plugins and themes. Today I will show you how you can prevent this from happening to your site and how you can fix it as well.
How to fix the Japanese Keyword Hacked WordPress Website?
The first step you should do is check your analytics/search console and see when did the problem start exactly. This can be helpful because if you know when the problem began you can revert your site to an earlier backup from the server or your own WordPress backups. The problem is easy to find as you will see something like this:
Once you find out when the problem began you can ask your webserver to restore your site to an earlier version before the problem began. One thing you need to keep in mind is that even if you revert the site can be infected again so for that you need to update your WordPress plugins and themes and install a security plugin. Try to remove plugins that have not been updated for a long time as those are the most susceptible ones to have malware on them. They can be used to create backdoors to your site and make changes without you knowing.
After restoring your site to the version without the malware you will need to install the Wordfence Security Plugin. Even the free version will be enough for this problem as the scan feature shows you which files have been changed or updated and which unknown or unwanted files are in your site directory. You can simply do a scan and delete the affected files which are usually like index.php, style.php etc.
Also, make sure you update all your plugins and themes and manually check for any unwanted code in your header.php or footer.php file. You can check this by going on to the Appearance -> Theme Editor section in your dashboard. Search for the header and footer.php file and see if there is any unwanted Javascript on them.
Some times the malware can also affect your .htaccess file so you also want to delete the old .htaccess file and create a new one. Simply remove your old .htaccess file from the server where you have your site set up and create a new one by going into Settings-> Permalinks and hit save without making any changes. This will create a new .htaccess file automatically.
How to get rankings back after Site is affected with Japanese Keyword hack?
After fixing all these problems you will still want to check your SEO rankings as they will be affected heavily.
The first step is to delete your old sitemap from search console and submit it again.
Then go to your search console and find out pages that end in “.htm” which will look something like this:
Use the removal tool from the search console and remove all the URL that is listed on them:
You will have do remove all the URLs one by one so it will take some time. Try to remove the pages that are in position 1 – 10 or have higher impressions as they have been in the search result for a long time or much more visible. After doing this you also want to share your top pages that gather drive traffic to your site using social media as they can be indexed more easily. Try to share on as many platforms as possible like Facebook or Twitter. Your ranking can come back quicker depending on how soon you fix the malware issue on the site. For me personally, it took 5 days for the rankings and clicks to get back on track.
