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Asked: 2026-06-04T01:06:55+00:00

I have website (thebyandby.com) that got hacked several weeks ago. The problem is, the

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I have website (thebyandby.com) that got hacked several weeks ago. The problem is, the description on Google is showing a spam description for viagra and one the most popular posts (when linked to from Google) goes to a spam website.

The site is a WordPress website so I reinstalled the theme and made sure everything was updated. There are only two plugins installed, Akismet and Google Analytics. I don’t think the plugins could be effected but I am not sure. The problem was still there so I checked when Google last indexed my site and it was after I had reinstalled my theme. I checked for malware from Google Webmaster and it said it didn’t find any malware. I ran grep -r “viagra” on my entire web directory and nothing was found. I really don’t know what else to do. Could this be a database problem?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, it could well be that you have content in the database which is compromised. After all, that’s where all the pages and posts are stored. Does your hosting company provide a tool like phpMyAdmin for browsing and editing the database?

    But equally, if you have only reinstalled the theme then there are a lot more core WordPress files that could have been compromised by the hacker. Given that you are having problems, it would be well worth doing a complete reinstall of the WordPress files. Just make sure you keep a copy of your wp-config file, as you will need to copy that back. Also make sure you reinstall the same version of WordPress that you currently have.

    But you know what: It may save you time in the long-run to just export all your posts and pages from within WordPress and then wipe the hacked site completely and install the whole thing from scratch. You can open the export file in any decent editor and once you’ve got your head around the XML structure, you can delete any rubbish that the hacker put there. I guess this option depends on how much content you had already put up on the site and how readily you could reconfigure the new site to match the old one.

    Of-course if you have a full files and database backup from before the hacker got there, then you have an easy option that avoids all this grief 😉

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