In our last post we wrote about a malware script we have been dealing with the past couple of weeks. That it was being injected into WordPress footer files and how to remove it.
If you find this quickly and deal with it, there is minimal impact to your site. But if you don’t discover it quickly, you could end up on Google’s ‘Attack Site’ list and they will block visitors from visiting your site.
Curious about your site’s health status? Google has a tool for checking to see if there are any problems with your site. Replace the last part of this link with your domain they will show you a report:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=yoursiteurl.com
Right now we’re going back to our topic for this post… How to submit your site to Google after you have cleaned up following a malware attack.
First thing you are going to need is an account at Google Webmaster Tools.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Once you have an account set up, you will need to add a website. There’s a button for this prominently displayed on the index page. Click on it and you will be offered a field to enter your site url. I usually have this on my clip board ready to paste in.
Next they will require you verify ownership the site. There are several different methods offered. You can add a meta tag they provide or download an html file, which you then upload to your site. This fast and easy as long as you have an FTP program or web site authoring tool with file transfer set up. Explaining how to use these is beyond the scope of this post and if you don’t how to do this, you are someone who should have professional help.
Once you have uploaded the google html file or inserted the meta tag into your home page header, go back to the Google Webmaster tools page [still open I hope!] and hit the ‘verify site’ button.
There are various things you can look at in Webmaster Tools but we in there for a particular reason at the moment. We want to get our site pronounced healthy and open to visitors again. To do this, look for the ‘diagnostics’ link on the left side bar. Clicking will expand the menu. The ‘malware’ link take you to a page with an alert that your site is blocked. Here is where you will be able to submit your site and add a little message about what you have done to clean out the malware.
That’s all there is to it. It’s not hard but then we do this for a living. If you need help with this or something else on your site that is beyond your technical comfort level. Contact us!
Happy Trails,
Billy
PS - Next post we’ll talk about a few plug-ins to help with security.
