Did you get the dreaded red screen of death when you went to your website? Yes you have been hacked and this could be a long road. The big question is what can you do to get the warning removed and to get your site clean and healthy again. Google has gotten really good at finding sites that are being affected by malware. I have never seen a case where they are wrong about this. Hacked sites suffer tremendously because they will quickly lose their Google rankings and their visitors lose faith pretty quickly when they know that your website isn’t safe for them to visit. So here are the steps you can use to get rid of the Google malware warning and get back to business as usual.
1. Remove the malware from your website
This can sound simple but here are a few things to keep in mind. If you have shared hosting your infection can be coming from any website that is on your server. So you can’t just clean one all of them need to be checked as well as your entire server. For this part I suggest you hire a professional malware removal service because if you miss just one file it can come back and if you delete the wrong file you can crash your website. We offer a complete WordPress malware removal service that will remove the malware and harden your website from future attacks.
2. Harden your website
Whats the point of removing the malware if you haven’t fixed the root of the problem. The reason someone got into your website is because there was a weakness that they took advantage of. This weakness could be many things such as weak passwords or many times on WordPress hackers will leave backdoors that will allow them to get back into the site. These backdoors have to be removed as well as other vulnerabilities.
3. Resubmit to Google
If you don’t have a Google Webmaster tools account for your website then you need to create one. Once you verify ownership under the security section on the left Google will say that you have malware. They usually will show you some examples of the malware and they also give you the ability to resubmit your site so they can review it. If there is no malware present they will remove the red warning screen.
These are the general steps in getting the warning message removed. We highly suggest that you hire a professional to removal the malware for you. This is tricky and you have to make sure you get everything. If you don’t, then you can expect it to come back.
