Many of use spend a significant amount of time and often money on SEO and SEM, marketing our sites. The scariest thing imaginable is rolling out of bed in the morning, stumbling to your computer, loading up your site and seeing this:

If you see this in Google Chrome, it means your WordPress site has been listed in Google’s malware or phishing list. This means that:

1. You disappear from Google’s search results. It doesn’t matter how high you rank or how much effort you invested. You’re gone.
2. Anyone who visits your site in Google Chrome will see this warning.
3. Many other users will get alerts from their virus scanners when visiting your site that get data from Google’s Safe Browsing API.

Life sometimes just isn’t fair and these things happen, sometimes to the biggest most famous sites. Microsoft accidentally marked Google as malware earlier this year. [Or so they claim]

Why does this happen? Simple: It’s almost always because someone has posted a comment or post on your site that contains a URL that is already on Google’s malware list OR one of your files contains a URL that is on the list. So you get marked as a malware or phishing site too.

If you want to minimize the risk that Google, the most important source of malware sites, will mark YOUR WordPress site as malware, simply install Wordfence. We constantly scan every URL in your comments, posts and files against Google’s safe browsing list. If a bad URL shows up on your site, you’ll be immediately alerted via email and can fix it before Google drops the hammer and your site traffic dwindles to nothing.

Wordfence includes a ton of other great WordPress security features, but this is by far one of my favorites.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Wordfence Creator.