Did google search console contact you saying your site has been hacked? Or have your seen Japanese or Chinese characters come up in your google search results? Chances are you your website has been hacked! Before getting overwhelmed or anxious, there maybe a simple way to remove it.

Here is a quick simple stratedgy I used to fix on one of my clients websites:

1. Check the hack actually exists

A simple way to check to that the hack exists on your website is to go to google and in the url type site: before the rest of the url you may think is iinfected.

example: site:thomasandrewhansen.com

After you do this you can check the results, if it coming up with a whole bunch of pages with japanese and chinese characters that dont exist in your site, you can tell you site has been hacked.

You can see the spike of the jump in pages.

2. Find out what time the hack happened

You can see in google search console when the hack may have occured as you will see a huge jump in pages indexed in your console. As seen the picture below:

3. Do you have a backup of your site?

Maybe you havent conciously kept a backup of your website, but more often than not your webhosting provider may have made a backup for you!

Let's go check it out!

Login into your hosting and look for a backup manager of any

Let's hope you have a backup manager in there that's automatically updates for you.

4. Make a backup of your current hacked site

1. Create a backup of your website.

You can do this using your backup manager, remember to name it correct... (with hack)

2. Export a copy of your data base

You should be able to find a way to export your database within the webhosting provider, if you cannot find a way to do it. Go to myAdminPHP and export your entire database from there.

Save it to your hard drive.

This is actually more a precaution than anything, if your backup manager is good, you should be able to import just your database back-in after reverting to an old copy

3. Revert back to an older version of your site and test

Using the URL Inspection tool you can see the insights on the right, where the Japanese Characters are populated.

After you have reverted to an older copy, check google search at the TEST LIVE URL section.

You should see the japanese characters removed like in the picture below.

Can you still see the Japanese Characters? If so try reverting back to a later date.

If they are gone, Great! Now let's get your database back up to date.