Comments on: “Fetch as Googlebot” tool helps to debug hacked sites

By: John

John — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:00:04 +0000

I echo Matt’s question from August – does the number of submissions available ever reset?

Working in a vertical market the limit of 10 soon gets used up when you have new clients coming online all the time. I guess the answer would be to create a WMT Account for each client but that then means having to remember which account and password to use, and as my clients have no interest in looking at the various bits of information in the WMT Accounts (they are busy earning a living looking after their own clients) it seems to be an extra level of complexity.

I can understand if you are a single website or even someone that looks after a few accounts but we are one of the leaders in our market and have over 1,00 clients!

By: Firas Darwish

Firas Darwish — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:40:46 +0000

nice i saw it earlier but never used it

i’ll try now

By: Ivan

Ivan — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 08:56:13 +0000

Hey Matt,

As wonderful as Fetch as Googlebot is, it is not useful for sites that use SSL/TSL, there is no option for fetching an HTTPS page using Fetch as Googlebot, so for secure sites all the requests result in a 301 response.

It’s worth noting that a certain other search engine allows webmasters to fetch as bingbot any url, including HTTPS urls, just saying.

Ivan

By: Jonathan Hochman

Jonathan Hochman — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 16:55:50 +0000

After un-hacking a site like this one it is incredibly important to update WordPress code, all the plugins and the themes. If you don’t, the site will just get hacked again, often within weeks!

By: Ray

Ray — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 07:31:51 +0000

I use the Fetch as Googlebot occasionally. I forgot that it will let you see how Googlebot actually sees a page. I think most people tend to use it for submitting a new page or post to Google. I know there is the Malware feature in Google Webmaster Tools as well. I guess I figured if a site was hacked then the Malware would be the place to start checking.

By: Tina

Tina — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:48:31 +0000

Doesn’t this basically show you the html code view of your website? What would be the difference in this and right clicking the page in Firefox, and hitting view source?

By: Innes

Innes — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:12:52 +0000

I think this will be welcomed by a lot of business owners when you consider the jeopardy this can cause to businesses and how disruptive this can be to their day to day operations. I think this could also be a wake up call for a number of web developers out there.

By: an SEO

an SEO — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:15:41 +0000

A couple things to note in the 12-step recovery process
- some hackers do heavy spam & light spam at the same time. Therefore you might clean out the heavy spam & think the job is done, while the lighter integrated spam remains.
- in addition to cloaking spam to Googlebot, some hackers may install files somewhere else on the server outside of wordpress, so you can clean up the issue & then have it return days later. in some cases if it returns, in addition to updating salts, wordpress passwords, ftp, database password & cleaning spam out of database and the spam files off the server, you might also need to change servers.
- some hackers also embed spam in some of the static files on the site too. and that stuff tends to use a display:none or also be deeply embedded into the content area in a way that is hard to notice at a glance.

@Brett yes those hackers do it to make money & make lots of it. They tend to target some of the most profitable areas, like prescription drugs and such.

By: Billie Hillier

Billie Hillier — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:17:53 +0000

I am dealing with this right now for several of my sites. Visitors send me the error messages, my host scans and says I am clean and so does my Webmaster tools.

For another site people don’t send messages, host and webmaster tools tell me that domain is not clean.

Very frustrating and I have been surfing all morning and just found this about the Googlebot tool. Yea – a new toy!

By: Ajay Prasad

Ajay Prasad — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:18:26 +0000

Thanks for the update..this has been driving me crazy for days now. I think Google does have a limit of 50 submissions per week for just the URL. One of the great features of this tool is that it lets you see your site as Google’s search bot sees it.