Feed contamination after unauthorised access is one of the harder Merchant Center situations — Google sees the bad data, not the reason for it.
Hacked account · Feed contamination

Merchant Center hacked account or feed contamination: what to fix and in what order

Unauthorised access to a Merchant Center account — or a compromised feed source injecting bad product data — creates a specific problem: Google's systems logged the violations before you knew they were there. The cleanup order matters because submitting a review request before the feed is clean will fail.

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How feed contamination causes a Merchant Center suspension

Google does not distinguish intent. If your feed contained products with mismatched prices, banned categories, counterfeit signals, or prohibited landing pages — even briefly, even because a third party pushed bad data — the violation is logged. The account or product group gets suspended based on what was crawled, not on why it was there.

Common contamination patterns

Third-party feed app pushing test products to live feed, compromised feed URL serving different data to Googlebot, CMS hack injecting redirected landing page URLs, plugin update corrupting price or GTIN fields, or a sub-account that inherited bad data from a parent account.

Why Google does not just accept "I was hacked"

Without evidence that the account access was unauthorised, the data has been cleaned, and the same injection vector is now closed, a "my account was compromised" appeal is weak. Google needs to see: what changed, when, and what prevents recurrence.

Cleanup order — do these before any appeal

  1. 1Secure the account first. Remove any unrecognised users from Merchant Center and your Google Account. Change passwords and revoke third-party OAuth access for any apps you did not deliberately authorise.
  2. 2Identify and isolate the contamination source. Check your feed file or URL directly — not through the Merchant Center interface. Look for products that do not belong to your catalogue, unusual categories, mismatched prices, or URLs pointing to third-party domains.
  3. 3Remove bad products from the feed at source. Deleting from the Merchant Center interface is not enough if the feed file or URL still serves them. The source needs to be clean before the next fetch.
  4. 4Fetch and confirm the clean feed. Force a re-fetch in Merchant Center and confirm the processing summary shows no products that should not be there.
  5. 5Document the timeline. Write down when you noticed the issue, what you found, what you changed, and what evidence proves the vector is now closed. This is what you submit with any appeal.
  6. 6Check your remaining live products. Confirm that every product currently in the feed has consistent price, availability, landing page, and structured data. A contaminated feed often masks pre-existing mismatches that need fixing independently.

If you are not sure what was actually flagged

The free diagnostic will read your specific error message and tell you what it most likely means for your situation. If you need a full evidence map — what was flagged, what needs fixing, what to document for an appeal — that is the £199 audit.

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Useful Patch does not guarantee reinstatement. We map what was flagged, rank what needs fixing, and help you build a stronger evidence file. Google makes the final decision.