Overcoming the Japanese Keyword Hack: A SEO's Journey of Resilience and Recovery
One of my biggest challenges in my SEO career was a security issue affecting my company's website. The website was hacked with a Japanese keyword hack that injected spam pages and resulted in Google SERP showing Japanese text. I identified the issue when our website's visits dropped, using Google Analytics tool. Screenshotimage1: Checked it by URL Inspection tool Screenshot 2 image : Also checked our website by the “site:” Search operator in Google SERP. Screenshot 3 image: There were 1.13K spam pages, as per the May 2021 coverage report in Google Search Console. Screenshot 4 image: The hackers manipulated our “website XML sitemaps” (and also “Robots.txt” file.) Screenshot 5 image: Hacker removed our WP admin privileges. To restore the website, I worked with the web development team to identify and fix any security vulnerabilities. As the exact issue couldn't be found, we decided to upload a fresh backup of the site. To prevent future hacks, we took the following st...