I spent some time yesterday reaching out to folks I know to try and get some input on WordPress security, avoiding getting listed as Malware and how to get removed from the Malware list. Rand Fishkin, the founder of SEOMoz and all round SEO God was kind enough to introduce me to Justin Briggs who is an SEO consultant and guru. Justin quickly came back with the following advice:
WordPress is certainly more susceptible to malicious attacks due to its popularity and the large number of sites that can be compromised with an exploit.The best preemptive solution is to keep up on updates and increase security associated with WordPress.Here are two good articles on ways to improve WordPress security.WordPress offers an article on hardening WordPress:http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress And Matt Cutts wrote a few tips on his personal blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/three-tips-to-protect-your- wordpress-installation/ If a site is compromised, Google will make an effort to get in touch with you. They outlined these details of how they attempt this here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py? answer=163633#3 They also offer some additional tips:Once a site has been cleaned up, you can send a request to Google:I’ve had a friend’s site who was exploited several months ago. It was a bit of work to get it cleaned up, but the warning was removed relatively quick after submitting the request to Google.
I contacted friends who are current and former Google employees but no luck getting in touch with the Malware team. In general it’s hard to connect with folks inside the big G with questions that are usually handled by support teams. [As I’ve been politely told in the past]. 🙂
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