yojimbokame

Ah, I didn’t realize I did not include links! This is my website And these are the types of links that are being generated. About 26,000 or so. Each would link back to pages like this. This is why I was concerned because I have no idea why this is happening. I did find a common trend however. I discovered a new folder called mapnaviga in root that was formed on December 24, 2019. The same day as the spike in all of these pages being indexed. So I’m not sure just what has happened and how to fix this. I have downloaded all of the xml data to see what was happening and removed them from the root just in case.

Edit: To add. This was only happening on the contact page. WPForms Lite was used and has been update regularly. Other plugins that were active at this time and used as well on the site include: Simple SSL, WP Fastest Cache, and Elementor.

edit 2: I did some digging into this and it comes up that I may have japanese keyword hack at play on my site. I have followed through with using wordfence to fix 29 issues (after a scan) and I will be following along with recommendations to fix this. If all works well I will leave a message and update the status of my post.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by yojimbokame.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by yojimbokame.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by yojimbokame.

Hi @abletec . Thank you for this well written, and extremely helpful reply. I went ahead and did the following as recommended. I have inspected all the files and so far I have not found anything that makes it look like my website has been compromised. I will have a professional look into it just to be safe. I have gone ahead and removed the page and the plugin that was active on the page. The thing that caught my attention was the formation of all of these url’s all on December 24, 2019, and these being logged under a sitemap folder (mapnviga). Other than that there were not any changes that I was able to observe. I have gone ahead to take steps to uninstall and reinstall wordpress and to use plugin’s like Wordfence and Sucuri. As well I will attempt Google to re-index after these fixes.