At a glance
A trusted domain,
borrowed by spammers.
What the client saw
“There are links in Google
we don't recognise.”
The client called us: when they searched for their own website, Google showed pages they had never created. Hundreds of them advertised fake products, many in Japanese, all sitting under the Wone8 Estates domain. Google had already crawled and indexed them, and Search Console showed the developer's site appearing for Japanese brand-name product searches that had nothing to do with property.
Why it hurt
The website is where
offline buyers check you out.
Wone8 Estates doesn't rely on search alone. Buyers find it through property listing portals and roadside hoardings, then go to the website to check the project before they enquire. That visit is the moment of trust.
When someone searches the brand after seeing a hoarding and finds spam next to the real project, the enquiry often doesn't happen. During the hack, visits from those channels dropped.
What was happening
The “Japanese
keyword hack”.
This is a common kind of attack, often called SEO spam, or the Japanese keyword hack when the pages are in Japanese. Attackers get into a site Google already trusts and use it to publish their own pages, which then borrow the site's reputation in search.
The real pages still look normal when you visit them, so owners often don't notice until someone searches the brand and sees pages they never wrote.
How it was cleaned
Removed, locked down,
then reported to Google.
Removed it at the source
The database, where the junk pages were stored, and the files, where the code that created them was hiding, were both cleaned. Plugins the site didn't need were removed, cutting the ways back in.
Locked the doors
Every password was reset, and a security layer was added with its protections switched on across the site.
Told Google
A re-crawl was requested through Search Console, so the junk pages drop out of results and the developer's real pages take their place.
The result
The developer's own pages,
back where buyers look.
The lesson
If you advertise offline,
your website is part of the sale.
A hack that only shows up in Google can still cost you the buyers your billboards and listings paid to bring in. Signs to watch for:
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