Check for Spam Content on Your Website

Updated: March 1, 2012

Many websites unknowingly contain spam content either in the form of links to spam pages on another website or they may be hosting spam pages. Having spam content on your website can negatively affect user's view of your website, can cause your website to rank poorly, or to be removed from search engines. It can also be a sign that your website has been hacked. You can check if search engines have found spam content on your website by doing a search for common spam keywords within in your website. To limit the search results to only your website you need to include "site:example.com", replacing example.com with your website's address, in your search query along with the spam keyword. Some commons spam keywords are: viagra, cialis, sex, OEM, and download. Depending on the content of your website those common spam keywords could have a legitimate reason for appearing in the website. With Google you can search for the presence of several keywords using OR, example: "site:example.com viagra OR casino OR xanax OR OEM OR prescription OR payday OR insurance". You can set up a Google Alert with the search query to automatically email you if they see spam keywords on your website.


Check Google for Spam on Your Website


Domain Name (do not include the www.):
Keywords to Check For:

You can get quick access to a check for a web page or a link from your web browser's contextual menu with our extension for Firefox and Chrome.


If your website contains spam content you will need to determine how it got on the website and how to remove it. If you allow unmoderated comments on your website, spammers will likely take advantage of this. Removing the spam comments and moderating future comments will take care of this. The other way that spam content can get into your website is through hacking. A hacker gains entry to website through a security vulnerability and then places the spam content on the websites. Many times the hacker will hide the content they place on the website so that it is not visible to users visiting the website but is visible to search engines. There are a number of tools that allow you to view hidden text or cloaked content contained on your website. To clean up the spam content you will need to remove the code that is adding the spam content to your website and fix the security vulnerabilities so that your website does not get rehacked.


Related:

Services

Resource