How a hacked cleaning site got 6x more visibility in 30 days
A Sydney cleaning, carpet and pest control company with 25+ years in business was close to invisible on Google. The reason: its site had been hacked, and Google was showing casino spam under its brand name.
- ClientSydney cleaning company (kept private)
- MarketSydney, Australia
- WorkHack removal, migration, schema
- Time6-month retainer, from Aug 2026
Google Search Console, last 28 days vs previous 28 days
The problem
Google showed casino spam under the brand
Searching the company’s own name showed Greek casino spam as the #1 result. A fake casino post was indexed twice.
Google was also being blocked by 406 errors, and the old domain sent visitors through a 3-hop redirect chain that passed almost no authority to the new site.
After the cleanup, a search for casino spam on the site returns 0 results.
What we did
The work behind the numbers
Hack removed
Casino spam, the fake post and a hacked author page deleted. Full malware scan, every admin login reset, 2FA turned on.
Domain migration
The old domain moved from a 302 > 301 > 301 chain to a single clean 301, so its authority passes over.
5 schema types
LocalBusiness, Organization, FAQ, JobPosting and Breadcrumbs, all valid in Google’s Rich Results Test.
Keyword map
11,032 keywords analysed and 7,788 mapped to a 180-page site plan.
Technical fixes
Old domain redirect: 3 hops down to 1
- 406 errors blocking Google fixed
- robots.txt and sitemap rebuilt
- Junk URLs de-indexed
- 24 toxic domains flagged
The results
Visibility up 6x in the first month
- Impressions: 366 to 2,200 (+501%)
- Clicks: 13 to 52 (4x)
- 183 new search terms in 1 month
The takeaway
Clean first, then grow
No amount of content helps while Google sees spam on your site. Removing the hack, fixing the redirects and adding clear schema brought results in the first 28 days.
Hacked site or spam in Google?
Get a free review of your site. We’ll tell you what’s wrong and the 3 fixes that would get you back on Google first.