blog spam/hijacking question

[robertmedl]

hi all,

i apologize in advance for this rather lengthy post, but i'm stumped and hoping to get some help with a problem that i have.

about 2 months ago, i was reviewing the "What Googlebot Sees" report for my gambling site ( xxhttp://www.theonlinecasinogamblingdirectory.com/ ) in the Google Webmaster Tools. it showed that the top terms were all prescription medication-related. after some research, i found that my wordpress 2.0.x blog was being hijacked in some way. by viewing the source for my blog entries, i saw all the prescription medication keywords invisibly stuffed into the top of my blog entries. i upgraded my wordpress blog ( xxhttp://www.theonlinecasinogamblingdirectory.com/blog ) to version 2.3 about a month ago.

since then, i've been reviewing the upgraded blog entries on a daily basis (again, by viewing the source, looking for the prescription medication keywords) as well as reviewing the new blog entries that i've been posting. i see no evidence of the offending keyowrds.

like i said, that was about a month ago. however, there is no change in the "What Googlebot Sees" report for my site in the Google Webmaster Tools -- it still shows all the offending keywords as the top entries in the report.

argh!

questions:

1) i'd have expected that the googlebot would have, by now, stopped seeing the offending keywords in my content. is a month too short a time to expect that to have happend?

2) is it possible that the offending keywords are somehow still being stuffed into my blog entries? like i said, i see no evidence of that happening since i upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.3.

i'm stumped here and would appreciate any ideas or leads for further investigation.

cheers!

[robertmedl]

thought i'd post a follow-up on this thread with some more information and some steps that i am taking to see if i can resolve this.

after some searching, i found this article in G help titled Urgent removal request: xxhttp://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61062

and here's what i did:

1. go to Google Webmaster Tools > Dashboard > Statistics > What Googlebot sees.

2. look in the table under Keywords > In your site's content.

3. create a comma-separated list of the offending keywords.

example: phentermine, viagra, rss, xanax, cialis, prescription

4. go to G, search for the top-offending keyword using the site: <URL>modifier

example: phentermine site:theonlinecasinogamblingdirectory.com

5. on the G SERP, click the link repeat the search with the omitted results included located at the bottom of the SERP.in my case, there were 57 such results.

6. create a list of the URLs on the SERP.

example:
theonlinecasinogamblingdirectory.com/blog/category/politics/
theonlinecasinogamblingdirectory.com/blog/category/pull-tabs/
theonlinecasinogamblingdirectory.com/blog/2008/07/10/freerolls-fill-fast/
.....

7. following the instructions in the Urgent removal request article, go to Google Webmaster Tools > Dashboard > Tools > Remove URLs.

8. Click the + New Removal Request button.

9. Select the option Cached copy of a Google search result. Click the Next button.

10. Paste an offending URL from step 6 into the entry field.

11. Select the option This page has been modified so that it no longer contains the information that is being cached. Paste the offending keyword list from step 3 into the entry field.

12. Enter some text in the Comments field.

example: Cached version of page contains irrelevant prescription-related terms from unauthorized blog hijacker inserted via style='display:none' tag. Page content has been updated. Security measures in place to prevent blog hijacking in future.

13. Click the Submit Removal Request >> button.

14. Repeat steps 7 - 13 for each offending URL.

i just completed this process for 16 of the offending URLs. before submitting the rest of the URLs, i'm going to wait and see if G will, in fact, remove the offending URLs from the cache.

i'll update this thread when i have more information.

[robertmedl]

the process above failed because the G bot was still able to find the offending pages. i realized that i had not followed the G instructions, and had not excluded the pages using, for example, a robots.txt file.

so, add step 6a to the process:

6a. disallow access to the URLs in step 6 using a robots.txt file.

example:
.....
disallow: /blog/category/politics/
disallow: /blog/category/pull-tabs/
disallow: /blog/2008/07/10/freerolls-fill-fast/
.....

the process above failed for most URLs and i simply could not figure out why. so, i took a more drastic measure -- disallowing access to the /blog/ directory using robots.txt and using the appropriate option when requesting removal. yes, my blog is not indexed any more, but i'll request re-inclusion is a week or so.

PM me if you're interested in my progress.

[sipka]

Webmaster Tools used to be very slow in implementing the changes 1-2 weeks are the minimum in the case of "Top keywords" section, sometimes it is more. I needed to exclude one URL some time ago, and the tools showed it almost for a month if not more - so I guess other parts of the Webmaster Tools are updated monthly.
If you are sure that those "sweet" words are not in your copy anymore, then you don't need to worry, Webmaster Tools will update itself, just you need to wait. It doesn't interfere with your rankings anyway.

If you want to be sure of what Google sees now search for your pages, check the cached version's source of those bad pages.