How to Fix the Japanese Virus Attack That Affects SEO
A common negative SEO problem is websites that end up hacked with thousands upon thousands of pages in Chinese or Japanese fully indexed. This practice is known as the Japanese Keyword Hack.
According to Zippia, around 30,000 pages are hacked per day. And this doesn't seem exaggerated—it's rare for anyone with some experience in the industry not to have encountered this situation at least once.
This type of negative SEO attack ends up exhausting the Crawl Budget and destroying the good reputation of the affected website. These pages can even end up engaging in blackhat practices that may result in SEO penalties, making this a fairly serious problem that should be resolved as soon as possible, both for the website's users and for how it affects search engines.
First, we should change all access credentials and check where they could have entered or made these changes.
In many cases, it's usually due to outdated or cracked plugins/themes to avoid paying for the license, or poor hosting. Although there may be different security issues that aren't easy to detect, such as certain hidden configurations in the code created to persist. Additionally, many apparently healthy pages, once this problem has been detected, could contain unwanted links through Cloaking techniques.
It's always recommended to contact a professional to solve these cases at their root. In any case, here are a few tips to patch and even solve the SEO problem as soon as possible.
A common mistake is trying to block all those pages through the robots.txt. This practice is dangerous because it will prevent Google from checking if the content has been removed.
While this tool is useful for deindexing content, it doesn't allow performing this action in Bulk (i.e., in mass). At most through URL prefixes (which if you enter all the Chinese characters at the beginning, the task will finish sooner).
However, this action by itself has no lasting value, as it will only last 6 months. Therefore, other complementary deindexation measures must be taken.
On the other hand, deleting pages from the backend one by one is a measure that must be done if they're there. But it can be quite problematic.
If you're lucky enough that the website doesn't have any content or URLs with Chinese characters, and the hack occurred with URLs containing Chinese characters, always after cleaning the website, you can take a drastic solution.
Through the htaccess if you're using Apache, you can generate a 404 response code for all pages containing Chinese characters. This will force them not to exist even if they were created from the back-end or with code.
This can be done through the RewriteRule directive, just like when redirecting parameters.RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [^\x00-\x7F]+
RewriteRule .* - [R=404,L]
When the 404 response code is generated, Google will understand when re-crawling that the page neither exists nor should be indexed. This solves the problem in a relatively quick way. The trick with these situations is to find patterns within all the mess we've received from being hacked to be as agile as possible in solving the problem from an SEO perspective.
It's unlikely, but there may be a Chinese URL that you don't want to delete. In that case, you could add an exception using the exclamation mark ! thanks to regex.RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [^\x00-\x7F]+
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/卡洛斯·桑切斯/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [R=410,L]
If the language turns out not to be Chinese but Japanese, it doesn't matter—Regex is wonderful. Then you would need to configure all URLs that have any Chinese or Japanese character (this could be done with any special alphabet).
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [^\x00-\x7F\x{3000}-\x{9FFF}]+
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/卡洛斯·桑切斯/ [NC]
RewriteRule . - [R=404,L]
In this case, the common pattern can get complicated. But there are still possibilities within programming. We would need to use a more elaborate server-side language such as PHP.
We could check if the variable for post/page titles or whatever contains any Chinese characters. And put it in a PHP file that always loads on any page. In the case of WordPress, we could do it in the functions.php using WordPress's own function for titles:function chinese_antihack() {
$page_title = wp_title('', false);
if (preg_match('/[\p{Han}\p{Katakana}\p{Hiragana}]/u', $page_title)) {
global $wp_query;
$wp_query->set_404();
status_header(404);
nocache_headers();
}
}
add_action('template_redirect', 'chinese_antihack');
It's possible that when a website is infected with this virus, it registers the different versions of the website in Search Console. It's better to take control of all of them and verify that you have all permissions.
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