It started like any normal workday until a teammate spotted something odd on our client’s WordPress site.
Story:
Hundreds of spammy Japanese-language pages had mysteriously made their way into Google’s index, hijacking our clean site with malicious content. But when we checked manually? Nothing. Just 404s.
The culprit? Cloaking. Googlebot was being served junk, while humans saw blank pages.
To make things worse, the hackers were smart. They created fake users but hid them from the WordPress admin. No trace. No control. No way to delete or edit them.
That’s when we got serious. But before getting to the solution how I solved this, Lets learn more about Japanese SEO Attack and Clocking
What Is a Japanese SEO Spam Attack?
A Japanese SEO attack is a type of black hat hack where spammers inject Japanese-language content and fake store pages into your site usually selling knockoff products. Their goal? Hijack your SEO authority to rank their spam in search results.
How Does It Attack and Cloak Your Website?
These attacks often exploit vulnerabilities in WordPress themes, plugins, or outdated core files. The attackers use cloaking, which means:
- Googlebot sees spam-filled pages.
- You and your visitors see clean or 404 pages.
How to Get Rid of Japanese SEO attack?
Here’s the 3-day battle plan that wiped the attackers out without relying on any bloated security plugins:
1. SEO Clean-Up:
- Blocked malicious pages in
robots.txt - Used Google Search Console’s URL Removals Tool
- Monitored and tested indexing to stay ahead
2.Technical Fixes:
- Replaced core folders (
wp-admin,wp-includes) with fresh WordPress files - Scanned
uploads, plugins, and themes for rogue.phpscripts - Cleaned
wp-config.phpand.htaccessfrom injected lines - Scrubbed the database manually—post tables, options, and fake users gone
The result? A clean, Google-friendly site back in action with no index lag, no surprises, no waiting.
Key Takeaway:
If you spot suspicious foreign-language pages in your Google results act fast. Cloaked Japanese spam attacks won’t fix themselves. Google won’t wait either.
I posted about this Japanese SEO Attack on LinkedIn.
Here are few Other Suggestions I got from other SEOs:
