Guide

Japanese text in your Google results? That's the Japanese keyword hack.

by Ken Armitt, Founder · updated 30 July 2026

The "Japanese keyword hack" creates thousands of auto-generated Japanese-language spam pages on your site, cloaked so you can't see them, and monetised through affiliate links for counterfeit goods. The visible symptom is Japanese titles for your domain in Google. Cleanup means removing the generated pages AND the backdoor, checking Search Console for rogue verified owners, and de-indexing the spam URLs.

What's actually on your site

This campaign (Google documents it under exactly this name) plants a page generator on compromised sites: thousands of Japanese-language pages selling counterfeit branded goods, in randomly named directories, often served only to search engine crawlers. Because they're cloaked, owners regularly insist "those pages don't exist" while Google indexes tens of thousands of them.

Its signature move: owning your Search Console

Uniquely, this campaign frequently adds the attacker as a verified owner in Google Search Console (via an uploaded verification file or token). That lets them submit spam sitemaps and monitor their yields — and it means any cleanup that skips Search Console leaves them holding keys. Check Settings → Users and Permissions, remove unknown owners, and delete their verification files/tokens from your site.

Proper cleanup sequence

1. Scope it: site:yourdomain.com in Google. Note the spam URL patterns.
2. Find the generator: the PHP that builds these pages on demand, plus its backdoor. Deleting visible spam directories without the generator is a two-day fix at best.
3. Evict them from Search Console: remove rogue owners, delete verification artefacts, remove spam sitemaps.
4. Close the entry point: usually an outdated plugin/theme or stolen credentials.
5. De-index at scale: ensure spam URLs return 404/410, then request removal; recovery of your real rankings follows over weeks.

This is one of the most persistence-heavy hacks in circulation — it's engineered to survive amateur cleanup. If you'd rather it simply be gone, that's what we do.