Google is one of the most popular search engines and if your website or blog is flagged by google then you are missing out on a lot of eyes viewing your site. Unfortunately, sites can be hacked with malware which can lead to them being flagged up as being dangerous to users. Once Google has flagged a site, this warning will be shown in the search results and this will discourage people from clicking on it. It is up to you or your webmaster to regularly check that your site is not marked as being unsafe. It is also up to you as the site owner, to check that once your malware has been removed that the Google Malware warning has been removed. Unfortunately google do not check regularly that sites are safe again once they have been cleaned therefore it is the duty of the webmaster to inform google that the site has now been cleaned and is safe.

Once you discover that your WordPress blog has been infected with malware and have completed the process for cleaning this from your WordPress site, you will need to remove the Google malware warning . This will then ensure that Google does not now flag your WordPress blog as dangerous or infected to users. It will also ensure that your website appears as safe in search results and will then not discourage users from clicking on the URL.

To do this you must request a Google Review to ensure that your site can now be listed as safe. It is important prior to requesting this review that you are 100% certain that any malware which was infecting your WordPress site has been correctly and successfully removed otherwise if there are problems you will only cause delays in your site being flagged up as safe again.

STEP 1 Complete the Google Safe Browsing Report

Complete the Google Safe Browsing Report by going to this URL  https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/

Enter the URL of your WordPress blog and confirm you are not a robot.

Once you type in the website address you will get confirmation that your report has been sent.

Step 2 Register with Google Webmaster Tools

To set about removing the malware warning, you need to register your site in Google Webmaster tools. Sign into the webmaster’s tools and check the security issues if you haven’t already done so.

In this security issues report, it will flag up URL’s which it suspects are problem URLs . Tick the box which says I have fixed the problem and this will prompt Google to go back and manually review whether the issues have been fixed or not, and then this message will be taken out the search results.

When you search for your website, you will see the list of websites, or just one website and there will be a message as shown which states that “hacking suspected – view details”.
Click on the URL and then on the left hand side you will see “security issues”

If you click security issues, this will show the details of what was detected and when.

Step 3 Request A Google Review

Complete the description of action you have taken to clean site.
You need to complete the short form to describe briefly how you have addressed the issues that have been found, complete this and then click on “request a review”.

Note as above, “that this process may take several weeks”. There is really nothing you can do to speed this up. However, it does mean that acting promptly to clean your WordPress site will minimize delays as much as possible.

Step 4 Message will appear to confirm successful review request

As you can see once you click request review there is now a message saying “Your request has been submitted successfully. Please check back later.” Usually this means that you need to check back in a month as it could take several weeks for the changes to take effect or for google to actually review the site.

Once the site has been found to be clean from any suspicious hacking activity, google will then remove the warning from their search results.

Step 5 Check Back at Regular Intervals
It is your responsibility as webmaster to make sure you check at regular intervals to ensure that your site details have been updated and the Google malware/hacking message has been successfully removed, otherwise you will have to perform this process again which will prolong the problem.

With WpDart you can remove malicious script from your infected website and restore it, putting you back in control instead of the hackers. Please check out our malware removal service here.