I have recently been managing a website that got hacked.  The website had a Forum created but after a few weeks it soon became apparent that the forum wasn’t getting used.  As such I concentrated on other parts of the website and took the forum link out from the Menu bar and any other places where I’d linked to it.

A short time later there were problems with my server loading times, crawler access errors and timed out messages in the Google Webmaster tools section.  I had made no significant changes to the site and couldn’t, at first understand why this was because according to Google Analytics there were no more visitors than normal.

I then searched Google, (site:www.thesiteinquestion.com) and found that the number of indexed pages in Google had more or less trebled.  At first I thought this was great until I investigated further.
It turned out that about 2,000 indexed pages were from the forum.  It seems that the forum had been hacked with a load of spam content.

Webmaster Tools Remove URL from google index

I immediately wrote to Google in webmaster tools, URL = https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration) to tell them I was aware of the hacking and to ask that they not let it alter my existing good Search Engine Results Pages.  They replied saying my site had no problems.

I still have pages with the directory Forum that have unsuitable URL’s for my site.  I’ve deleted all the Forum files from my server via FTP and FileZilla so that when any of the URL’s are clicked 500 status error code appears.  Although the error occurs the indexed pages are still being ranked in Google.

I still want to delete these URL’s from the Google index altogether.  In fact all search engine.

To do this I have to add a row of code in my robots.txt code.

I already have:

User-agent: *

Allow: /

And I have to add the following line of code:-

Disallow: /forum/

Once saved and uploaded to my server it should take a few weeks for all of these URLs to be taken out of the index.  Happy Days!

I’ll know when this has happened because as soon as I do a site search, the number of indexed pages will drastically reduce.  However the indexed pages left will be good quality and informative.