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Japanese Keyword Hack – How I Solved the Issue in Our Website

How many of you had to solve the Japanese keyword hack issue on your websites?

If you are seeing Japanese text in your website’s search results, then your website is probably a victim of Japanese keyword hack.

I had to solve this issue with my team recently when one of my websites got attacked by Japanese keyword hack.

I will try to explain how we were able to solve the issue on our website.

I hope it would help people here who are digital marketers or webmasters.

What is Japanese keyword hack?

In Japanese keyword hack attack, the title tags, and meta descriptions of various pages of your website will be displaying auto-generated Japanese texts.

Your website visitors would be seeing your normal pages, but the search engines would be seeing the infected pages.

You would see search results showing pages that would take you to some spam pages with Japanese texts.

It generally happens when you haven’t updated your CMS and you are still using an outdated version of the CMS.

Another reason could be the use of outdated plugins on your website. They may have many vulnerabilities and hackers could use that to spam your website.

What my team did to remove Japanese keyword hack?

Checked docroot – As a first step, we tried to find out any suspected files in the docroot of the website. Scanned it with antivirus and malware tools, to make sure that infected files aren’t there.

Took site backup – As is obvious, we took the backup of the website before the cleaning process.

Checked the recently modified files – To make sure that the attack was not from recently modified files, we checked them all, one by one.

Checked for newly created Search Console accounts – To make sure that hackers don’t have any admin access to the site, we checked the Search Console accounts. If you find any suspicious accounts, you must remove them.

Verified content of the .htaccess file – We verified the contents of the .htaccess file from the last known clean version of our backup.

Checked the XML sitemap – We checked the XML sitemap to make sure that the spammers haven’t added their spam pages to the XML sitemap of our website.

Temporary removal request – We identified pages with spam content in two folders of the website in search results. To remove those results from the search results, we gave a temporary removal request for all pages in those two folders. That made sure that the pages were no longer shown in results pages of search engines.

The result

After the process of removing the hack pages from the website and from search results, things got back to normal for the website.

But we had lost keyword rankings for most of the targeted keywords for the website. We are yet to revive all the rankings, though it is only one week since we salvaged the website.

In a reply to one of my posts on the issue, LinkedIn user Jahed Hossain confirmed that he would also check whether there is malware on the website, would remove it and then remove the Japanese URLs from Search Console.

The website of Astra Security has an insightful article on how to solve the Japanese keyword hack.

I would love to see responses from those who had solved the issue successfully. What you would have done differently?

Do visit the blog SEO with Aravind for more such tips on how to solve SEO related issues.

(This article was first published in my LinkedIn profile here.)