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Site Hack In Meta Description
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Hey MOZ Community,
I am looking for some help in identifying where the following meta description is coming from on this home page - https://www.apins.com. I have scrubbed through the page source without being able to locate where the content is being pulled from. The website is built on WordPress and metas were updated using Yoast, but I am wondering if an installed plugin could be the culprit. On top of this, I have had a developer take a look for the "hack" and they have assured that the issue has been removed. I have submitted the URL in GSC a couple of times to be re-indexed but have not had much luck.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated, the displayed description is below.
The health screening plays http://buyviagraonlineccm.com/ a significant and key role in detecting potentially life-threatening illnesses such as cancer, heart ...
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Google will often make up its own mind what to put in your description, especially if it thinks that your provided description doesn't match what it thinks the page is about.
I'm afraid your developer hasn't fixed the issue. I was looking in the wrong place (your screenshot identified the issue), the malware isn't replacing the meta description, but actually inserting text at the top of the page, but only when it detects that it is the Mobile Googlebot visiting.
Using Google Chrome Developer Tools you can set your user agent and see the issue yourself (See my screenshot)
If I were you, I'd disable all the plugins and then reload the page in Chrome with your user agent set and see if that helps, if not, I would look at your theme's JS/source files.
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Thanks Alex,
Appreciate the look through. Speaking from memory, but I believe the problem was removed around the 20th of January 2019. I have been manually requesting the indexing of the page in GSC every two weeks since that point, so as much as I would like it to be a waiting game, I have a feeling there is still an error and that leads to my next point.
Great suggestion on retaking a look at URL inspection tool. When I used the tool previously, I did not tab over to the "screenshot" mode, and that seems to be where this is all coming from. Take a look at my screenshot. The page is full of copy that matches up to that spammy meta description. My next two questions would be, how could this be overwriting my descriptions when I don't see any of this on the live site or in the page source? Additionally, there have been no security reports in our GSC account, is that normal?
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I can't see anything obvious. I did wonder whether it might be a script that only replaced the description when it was crawled by Google but I can't see any evidence of this.
If your developer is suggesting that they have removed the issue, I assume they did find a problem and have corrected it. When was it corrected? It may well just be a case of Google taking some time to update the index. You could check this in Search Console, use the URL Inspection and do a Live Test and then View Tested Page, check the source to see if the description is as expected.
If it is, I think it is likely just a case of waiting, given that you have already requested reindexing.
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