Google is showing erroneous results on SERPs page
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Hello, All,
In April, two months ago, we caught a hack on a client's website. It created about 40 pages in what looked to be a black hat link tactic. We removed the pages, resubmitted the sitemap.xml (it reprocessed) and ran it through screaming frog to confirm all the pages were gone, but the forty pages still show up in the search results for a site search. We have both the www. and non www. version of sites claimed and set a preference. Nothing is awry with the robots.text. We're not really sure what to do to resolve it. We asked Google to recrawl (fetch) the site. I'm not sure what's going on with it.
The website's name is fortisitsolutions.com
The site search bringing up the pages from the hack is below.
site:www.fortisitsolutions.com
Any ideas?
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It could be because of a large Google algorithm update or ranking flux; often, when the update has finished rolling out, then you might notice the difference in where the businesses ranks?
We sell garden offices, and we notice that the first page results on Google changes substantially during an algorithm update
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Removing the pages will cause them to 404. Google will not instantly remove 404 pages, as sometimes website servers have issues and incorrectly return a 404 status on pages that are meant to be valid. As a result, Google will re-visit this page over a period of time and after seeing a repeated 404 is will remove it from its index.
The easiest option to speed this up, should be to use Google Search Console "Temporarily Hide" option in Google. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal
Pages will disappear quickly after using this and my guess is it won't come back if it's still returning a 404 status. If it's easy for you, you could turn the 404s to 410 (forever gone).
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