Design studio and food blog

She should have been Portland's gluten-free food blogger. Search didn't agree.

Kendra Flores Design · thegffoodie.com · Coffee at Peet's, July 2026

What was happening

Kendra runs a design studio, and on the side she reviews gluten-free restaurants around Portland at thegffoodie.com. If you have a gluten allergy in this city, it is a genuinely useful site.

The problem she came with was simple: she wasn't easily found as the local authority on gluten-free dining, which is exactly what she is.

Looking into why, we found the site had been hacked. A bot had been quietly generating pages on it for roughly two years, and search engines had indexed thousands of them. Her actual restaurant reviews were competing for attention against pages that had nothing to do with her.

By then the WordPress admin was unreachable, so nothing could be fixed from inside the site. That is why it had gone unresolved for so long.

What we did

• Got in through the hosting layer, since the admin was a dead end.
• Cleared out the pages that weren't hers, disabled the duplicates, and regenerated the sitemap from scratch.
• Wrote and implemented her meta descriptions and titles, so the pages that are hers describe themselves properly in search results.
• Cleaned up the WordPress install and replaced a scattered set of plugins with a single SEO plugin handling meta, social previews, schema, and the sitemap in one place.
• Walked her hosting provider through how the bot got in and what to lock down so it doesn't recur.
• Set up Google Search Console and submitted the clean sitemap, so there's a baseline to measure against going forward.

Where it landed

• Her post sitemap is now exactly 28 URLs, and every one is a real GF Foodie post.
• Search engines see the site she actually built, described the way she'd describe it.
• Her hosting is hardened against the thing that caused it.
• She has Search Console for the first time, so what happens next can be measured instead of guessed at.