The other day I was undertaking some investigation work into a site that had their rankings punished in the search results. After hours of thorough analysis I discovered that we website had in fact been hacked by a very sophisicated hack.

The Wordpress site was hacked with hidden links that did not appear to a normal user only to Googlebot. To spot this hack you use to have to click on the cache button in the search results to view Google’s cache of the page, then click ‘text version’ only. If you the see links which are not on the site you could have been hacked.

Google however have now added the ‘fetch as Googlebot’ feature in Webmaster tools where you can view exactly what Google see’s. Using this new feature I was able to see the hidden links almost immediately. What was great was the speed Google returned the page, it was literally a matter of seconds.

If you have discovered your site has been hacked you should contact your web developers or hosting company to remove the hack, and then repair the vunerability. This could be resetting your FTP password, or even changing server. In this case I had to backup the database, remove the files from the server, then reinstall Wordpress core files. Once you have fixed the issue you should use the fetch as Googlebot feature to check the offending code has been removed.

Once you have managed to fix the hack you should submit a reinclusion request to Google. Your site should return back into the listings soon.