Articles on: WordPress

How to Fix the Japanese Keyword Hack in WordPress

The Japanese keyword hack is a spam-related hack that creates new pages with autogenerated Japanese text on your WordPress website. The hackers add themselves as a property owner in Search Console, to increase profits by manipulating your site’s settings.

Please back up your entire site and the database as well before you start the cleanup process.

Check the Google Search Engine Console and delete the sitemap, which wasn’t submitted by you by logging into your Google search engine and navigating to the sitemaps page. Also, check the users who have access to this site property and remove any owners or users not created by you from the managing users, owners, and permission Help Center. You can view all the verified user details by clicking on Verification Details.

Check your .htaccess File
Check WordPress site root directory and access the .htaccess file using your CPanel > File Manager. Check for the rules set under the .htaccess file. or simply remove the .htaccess file and create a new file with the same name, then add the default WordPress htaccess rules and save.


The hackers may target the WordPress configuration file named wp-config.php. Remove unwanted contents from this file that are not available in the wp-config.php default file.

Remove all your site files (except wp-content / wp-admin / wp-includes / wp-config.php) and re-upload the new files downloaded from WordPress.org to remove a hack or malware infection.

Check all your wp-content/uploads directory for any .php, .js and .ico files. Check all these files for any weird file name. Then check the content for weird characters and strings inside the file. If you find any such file, then delete the same. Also keep in mind that your media file directory under wp-content/upload should not contain any .php, .js or .ico files.

Lastly, monitor any file changes made, and audit them. If they seem to be legit, then ask Google from your Search Console to re-consider your site. After a few days, they should whitelist your site and send you a reply.

Read more from this link :

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/hacked/fixing_the_japanese_keyword_hack

Updated on: 07/01/2023

Was this article helpful?

Share your feedback

Cancel

Thank you!