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.

Several of our clients had their WordPress blogs hacked. A malware Javascript was used to load bogus sites was injected into the page footers.

How can you tell if you have this problem on your WordPress site or blog?

This particular script, is easy to spot from how your site reacts even though it is not visible in the content. When you visit your site [or blog], instead landing at the top of the page where you would expect to start, the script immediately takes you to the bottom of the page instead. If it does this, then there is a strong likelihood you have this malware on your WordPress.

If you use Firefox for your web browser, you may get an ugly warning page that your site has been reported as an attack site. Not fun. You will not be able to access your site at all… anywhere. This can make it harder get to rid of the problem because you may not be able to access your site admin area. Internet Explorer did not block entry to the sites because of this particular malware.

What should you do if this has happened to your WordPress?

If you can access your WordPress admin area using your web browser, then it’s relatively easy to get rid of the malware script. This particular exploit only affects one file, named footer.php.

You can edit this by going to Appearance=>Themes=>Editor and opening this file in the editor pane. The files are all listed to the right hand side of the pane.

Now you edit the footer.php file to remove the script. It will look like this screenshot of the one we removed from several sites.

Screenshot of malware javascript

Select the entire script with your cursor being careful not to touch anything else. Delete it and save your changes. Your site is clean again.

WARNING: If you needed these instructions, you are not someone who should be doing this on your own and we so we wouldn’t normally recommend you even attempt this yourself. But it’s simple deletion so we thought we’d include it here. Even so, if there is any doubt in your mind about whether you should be doing this yourself, get help. If you don’t have a web person, contact us for help

If you are one of the unlucky ones who have been reported as an attack site, you will need to submit your site to Google for it to be declared clean otherwise visitors may not be able to access your site for some time.

It may be cleared without submitting it but it will definitely take much longer. Posting right away and each day for a few days will alert the search engines to spider your site and find a clean, malware free site.

Stay tuned for our next posts where we will discuss how to submit your site to Google Webmaster tools for review and what you can do make your WordPress more secure from this type of an attack.

One of the best ways to ensure you are replying to a tweet is “Tweetdeck”  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/Tweetdeck 

Tweetdeck is a very popular application for running Twitter on your desktop and phone. It has many features, but one of its best is its one-click retweeting feature – hovering over a profile picture provides the easy option for retweeting anyone’s tweets – just click the bottom left icon.

Here’s is how it looks on my computer screen

Tweetdeck is free to download, installs quickly but how would anyone get any work done!

At this site you can post a video or article, or watch a video / read an article. It is a networking service that allows users to create and post online educational “how-to” multi-media for enjoyment, knowledge and entertainment.

The Terms of Use is quite long but probably worth reading.

Check it out!

http://www.oneminuteu.com/

Jan

First, anyone that works in my field no doubt has set-up Google Analytics for clients and put coding on their pages. Usually they sign-up and give you their account information so you can enter the domains and inset the code — right. That’s normally what happens with me.

A couple of weeks ago a client wanted me to set-up his analytics. He wanted me to do this through his Adwords account. In order for me to do this I had to get admin privileges. That was fine and I set up his sites and put the coding in. No problem, all worked fine. Except when I went to check my own Google Analytics for my sites. Guess what happened — yep!

I went to sign into what I thought was my account and instead I was now signed into his. No sign of my sites. Nada.

Luckily my partner had originally hooked up the account so I could get in and check to make sure everything was working. It appears to be, though many of my pages now have no bar and even my overall page rank has dropped. Does this ‘mix-up’ have anything to do with that, I don’t know, not yet.

I have signed up for a new Google account and have permissions on my own analytics now. I also have a support ticket into Google.

The moral of the story — if you are going to set up Google Analytics for a client always use THEIR login and password information — not yours.

I’ll keep you posted on what Google says.

A bit wiser this Friday…

Jan