Site Blacklisted
-
Good morning.
Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware.
It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted.
I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again. I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc. I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords.
I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take?
Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing?
Thanks
-
That is good to hear, Jo.
Thanks for letting us know. feedback is good.
Be vigilant, because the hackers never stop.
My dedicated server constantly has hackers trying to break in, mostly chinese and russians. Complex passwords and countermeasures keep us safe, but it only takes one weak link somewhere to break it all down.
-
Thanks all for your help, I was de-blacklisted this afternoon - phew.
-
The webserver log is what you need.
You may be able to see that in Cpanel, depending on how it is configured.
The log may also be in the document root, updated daily and compressed.
If you haven't looked at logs before, it can be difficult to determine what is really going on in there.
-
I didn't check the dates The site is less than a month old though.
When you say logs, I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for. I use cpanel so have access to various logs, but I have to admit, I haven't spent any time in there and now I'm conscious that this is something I need to educate myself on quick.
Any suggested resources for which logs to use for what?
-
Jo,
before you removed the bad files, did you check the dates?
If you have logs, you could go back to see when those files were first accessed.
Then go backwards looking for activity that doesn't look normal.
That could tell you where the problem is.
-
Thanks, I'm not so sure! I'm a freelancer and I wok on my own so I have nobody to really bounce ideas off, so this community is great for that. Glad to know I'm doing it right
I'm not a bit lover of plugins and I try to keep to a minimum, but I've removed anything unessential - even my beloved Flare sharing buttons, for now anyway.
I'll let you know when Google come back to me
-
I just want to reiterate what Andy said about sitespeed as well, try to have as little plugins as possible.
When you visit a WP site and its super slow, its usually because they have gallery plugins and all sorts running which sucks the life out of the sitespeed.
Anyway, good luck seems as though you know what your doing anyway.
-
Thanks all for your responses, much appreciated.
I installed the timthumb vulnerability scanner and it says no instances were found.
I'm going to go through and ditch the unnecessary plugins...I use woocommerce and they have recent upgrade but its not compatible with my theme so I can't update it, which is a giant pain. I hope its not that.
Thanks for your help.
-
Agree
-
I think you have already done quite a bit.
I suppose just be a little more selective which plugins you install, some have holes in and once the word is out about particular holes in certain plugins these people will come looking for blogs with it installed.
-
Hello Jo.
Do you know exactly how they got in?
If not, here is one possibility:
Check to see if you have a copy of timthumb.php
If you do, and it is an old version, it has a vulnerability you must fix, otherwise it will happen again.
Here is information about that, including a scanner that should find and fix that problem.
<cite>wordpress.org/extend/plugins/timthumb-vulnerability-scanner/</cite>
-
in my experience, and i've a fair bit with WP, the majority of malware comes from plugins which get updated and become infected themselves. Wordfence certainly can help with this problem, but a regular securi scan will too.
My advice is deactivate and uninstall any plugins you don't really need or use - this will make the site faster and more secure.
Once the malware has gone you can do as you have and ask for relisting or wait it out, google will come back and check. Manual reviews will take a few days to come back I believe, though it depends on the nature of the malware - if its believed to be complex it will be manual if its just one file being "naughty" a robot may scan your site to take a look that it's gone and it could be up in 24-48 hours.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site's IP showing WMT 'Links to My Site'
I have been going through, disavowing spam links in WMT and one of my biggest referral sources is our own IP address. Site: Covers.com
Technical SEO | | evansluke
IP: 208.68.0.72 We have recently fixed a number of 302 redirects, but the number of links actually seems to be increasing. Is this something I should ignore / disavow / fix using a redirect?0 -
Mobile site not getting indexed
My site is www.findyogi.com - a shopping comparison site The mobile site is hosted at m.findyogi.com I fixed my sitemap and attribution to mobile site in May last week. My mobile site pages are getting de-indexed since then. Website - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - indexed Mobile - m.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - _not indexed. _ Google is crawling my website and mobile site normally. What am I am doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | namansr0 -
Site not loading on Firefox
Hello guys, I can't get my website to be loaded on Firefox, why's that?
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Googlebot cannot access your site
"At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site" We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then. When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google. The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else. The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out. The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google. Does anyone have some input?
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
Site maps, Is there any benefit?
I have a relatively simple and small site (60 pages). All of it is crawlable and there is nothing I want non follow. So, is there any real benefit to a sitemap since Google can get to all the site anyway? Do they give the site more credence or something because it's there? I guess as an aside, are there any favorite sites that will generate a site map? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Site forwarding - seo friendly or not?
Recently i decided to change my domain name - and although i have written several useful and working .htacess files with 301 redirects, this one became more complicated by the fact that I went through TWO domain name changes, before settling on the second one. Having seen some issues with the browser not being able to interpret correctly the .htaccess file, i temporarily suspended the .htaccess file, and opted instead for site forwarding. I don't know the mechanics behind site forwarding, or whether it is seo friendly or just a method for ip addressing, a sort of pseudo domain name server record change.
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites
I let it lie for a few weeks, until the dust settled, and yesterday put back the basic .htaccess file, with a 301 redirect, which directs the original domain name to be forwarded to the new one ( also it has a conditional in place to solve canonical issues). It works fine. But right now i am not seeing the link juice, the domain age, the domain page rank that it has. It has gone to zero, when it used to be three, sometimes four. I also made the change of address using webmaster tools. How long ( forever?) will it take to see my old page rank come back, even if it loses 10% from the change? And does site forwarding help or hinder seo ranking?0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Value Of You Tube Videos Embedded on Site
I have seen this response http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/36353/video-sitemaps-for-youtube-embedded-videos That basically answers this question by saying that Google will give value to the site embedding the video. However I have seen much talk about this whether this really ads any value to the actual site. So By searching videos on Google my site will NOT come up in the results for any embedded video. What would the actual value be?
Technical SEO | | zachc_coffeeforless.com0