There are hacks shared by users on how to do it via the admin area: create a new admin-level account with the new name, log in using it, remove the old one. However, this is risky and cumbersome if you care about not losing your existing posts posted under the old admin user. I prefer doing this through the MySQL database that WordPress is run on. Here is how (this explanation is targeted at those whose hosting is Unix-based with CPanel and phpMyAdmin but the same logic applies to any other hosting setup where a WordPress blog can be installed):

1. Log into your CPanel

2. Click on the phpMyAdmin icon:

3. Select the database associated with your blog:

4. You need the table called wp_users:

5. Click Edit next to the admin user:

6. Change the user name for the admin user:

7. It is also a good idea to change the ID for the user in the database as the default one for the admin user is 1 and this often gets exploited as well. T do this, you need to go to the SQL tab of this screen:

Here you need to run the following SQL queries:

UPDATE `wp_users` SET `ID`= 'XX' WHERE `ID`= 1;
UPDATE `wp_usermeta` SET `user_id` = 'XX' WHERE `user_id` = 1;

Replace XX with any number you fancy (needs to be the same number in both lines), copy and paste these two lines in the query window and click Go. This will change the user ID from 1 to whatever you wish and change the reference from the other table mentioning it to the correct ID.

Negative SEO has been very much in the limelight since the first Penguin update rolled out last year but apart from those who had to deal with it before, there is generally little understanding as to what it is, how to spot it and what can be done to protect a site against it (or if it’s even possible to protect a site against negative SEO). I’ve had a lot of questions and people have shown plenty of interest even after a 40-minute talk on negative SEO I did at ThinkVisibility last month, so I thought it would make sense to offer a workshop in addition to my talk where I could offer you more information and practical tips on the subject.

The problem with negative SEO for most people is that this is something they have never faced before so they have no experience handling these issues. Yet, this is a very real threat. I have been doing SEO security audits and negative SEO campaign investigations for many years, way before these have become buzzwords, so I have seen a lot of stuff most SEO practitioners hardly ever come in touch with. Through this experience, I can offer you better understanding of the problem and teach you how to approach it.

Because this has been a last-minute idea, we will only be offering a small 2-hour workshop, and with limited availability. But because clearly many of you couldn’t have planned your time in advance, this being very short notice, I decided to run not one but three workshops in 3 places: Brighton on Saturday, April 13th, London on Tuesday, April 16th and Leeds on Wednesday, April 17th.

Here are the details of each of these workshops:

• Brighton Negative SEO Workshop: Friese-Greene House, 15-17 Middle Street, Brighton, Saturday, 13 April 2013 from 12:00 to 14:00 – get the tickets
• London Negative SEO Workshop: Lawrie Cornish, 72-75 Marylebone High St, London, Tuesday, 16 April 2013 from 15:00 to 17:00 – get the tickets
• Leeds Negative SEO Workshop: ICS-digital, Manor House, Manor Street, Sheepscar, Leeds, Wednesday, 17 April 2013 from 12:00 to 14:00 – get the tickets

In each of these workshops, you will learn how to:

- do an SEO security audit to evaluate any possible vulnerabilities of a site that could make it easy to run a negative SEO campaign ,
- fix onsite issues that could cause problems,
- fix offsite issues,
- diagnose a possible negative SEO campaign.

Nick Garner of SearchWorks who has a lot of experience in one of the most cutthroat markets – gambling – will be helping me with these workshops so you will hear his take on offsite issues and how they can be prevented and/or eliminated.

You will walk away from these workshops with a hands-on knowledge you could apply to the sites you work on right away. The tickets are limited, as I said, so hurry before they all sell out. If this goes well and generates enough interest, I am looking into running full day workshops on this and other topics in the future.

If you have any questions or what to clarify anything, feel free to leave a comment or contact me by email and I will get back to you.

Hi,

I have gone through your site and liked it very much. I would like submit
an exclusive guest post on your site. Since you generally publish guest
posts from different authors in your niche, I thought it would be nice if I
too had an opportunity to offer something really valuable and informative
to your readers.

I understand the need for unique and well-researched content. The post will
be “SEO or Web Designing” I would also like to request you to suggest any
topic, on which you would want me to write articles.

I ensure you that the articles will be unique and not published elsewhere
on the internet.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Mary

Let’s leave aside for a moment this email being not really as personal as most blog owners would like guest post requests to be. The targeting is so off! I mean, I can totally understand why they picked me up. They fired their tools, ran a Google query for SEO + “guest post”, since both terms get menitoned on this blog sure enough it came up in the results. Have I ever accepted any guest posts? Hell no! Except for one time I suggested half-jokingly over Twitter to a friend that he publish one here, I have never seriously considered the idea of opening up my doors to strangers posting. No matter how frequently (not) I post here, this is the blog that goes with my professional consulting site, the views expressed here are exclusively my own, and I am not going to change this any time soon.

This is the reply I sent to this blogger:

Mary,

No I do NOT generally publish guest posts from different authors in my niche, or any other niche for that matter. Do your homework FFS. Just because my site comes up for a search for “guest post” does not necessarily mean I accept them, it simply means I mention the words somewhere on the site, and by not doing any further filtering or checking all your catch manually you have no idea about the context in which it is mentioned, and thus mistarget me (and a bunch of others, I am sure). Furthermore, since you are this poor at doing your job, I have no reason to believe you can come up with a worthy post and hence, even if I indeed published guest posts on my blog, I don’t think your content would qualify.

Best regards,
IrishWonder

Automating your efforts is cool, I understand the need to scale them, how many guest posts does it take to rank a site for “SEO”? But hey, there’s another way to increase the ROI of your outreach campaigns: improve your targeting, and as a result improve your response/success rate. Ever considered this?

And even then, I still do not qualify.

(The keywords I checked the rankings for are just a random sampling of what Interflora used to rank for before the penalty)

However, these results are not quite stable at the moment and keep fluctuating, and also differ a bit by specific location.

Why has it got back? I highly doubt disavowing links has anything to do with it as, even if it had been done, and did have a positive effect, the results wouldn’t have been visible so fast.

What about link removals? According to MajesticSEO, Interflora did lose quite a few links as of March 1:

Among these links, I see quite a few blogs but as we established, it were not the blogs that caused the trouble in the first place. As for local newspapers, I could only spot Yorkshire Times, but by the looks of it it hadn’t been one of those advertorials – more like a banner ad as it had no anchor text.

Those into cheap sensations probably wouldn’t fail to spot a lost link from Branded3 and speculate about things. However, no sensation here – this doesn’t look like an attempt to hide any traces of association with Interflora (it’s still listed as one of the clients, although there has never been a link from the clients page). Rather, this was a result of a common “housekeeping” maintenance, the link being changed from the main domain to a subdomain blog.interflora.co.uk as it seemed more fitting, Branded3′s blog post quoting a blog post on Interflora’s blog.

Looking at the anchor texts of the lost links, one certainly does not see the keywords Interflora got back ranking for among the top removed ones (e.g. just two links with the “flowers” anchor text). Here is the pivot table:

So what has really happened? Well, we’re now entering the murky world of undocumented (offline) connections and ungrounded speculations, and I don’t really like making things up. The idea here is pretty clear however – Google does like making a large brand a showcase for its public relations campaigns every now and then, but can you honestly expect a 100-year-old company NOT to rank for whatever they are doing?

Notice suspicious similarities in the number of domains with the same ns records, mx records and hostmaster? Further digging reveals a list of sites which, randomly checked, have strikingly similar whois records:

Truth be told, some of the domains do have either private registration or are registered in private persons’ names, but when it all adds up the overall setup is still very sloppy and lazy. Gareth over at SEO Doctor has come up with similar findings that seem to further confirm my understanding of what happened. On the surface, each and every one of these sites has an Interflora logo and links back to the main site. Ask any blackhat whose network has been burnt and they will tell you where a sloppy network setup can lead. Setting a proper secure network for linking purposes is not a job for an amateur.

Anyway, another big question being asked is who was responsible for getting Interflora penalised. Whoever is doing the current “blogger anti-outreach” is surely acting pretty clueless and helps create additional reputation issues but looks like this is some new agency that has been brought in to help fix the situation and probably has nothing to do with the actual reasons for the penalty. Somehow, people have been pointing fingers at Branded3 but (unless those people have any kind of insider information) from the case study on their site it’s not clear whether Branded3 was involved in the company’s SEO campaign at all:

Interflora appointed Branded3 to design and develop a new web-based system to replace their cumbersome and expensive directory of internationally available products.

Upon some googling, I have uncovered the following agencies naming Interflora as their client:

• Croud – apparently this is the agency responsible for their PPC;
• Found – the Interflora logo is there but it is not clear what they have been doing for them;
• SLI Systems – onsite search improvement (the site itself has exactly the same content on their US and UK sites, hmm);
• Pixel8 – “contacting previously untapped markets” (quite vague, is that the blogger outreach campaign?);
• adigi – “flash banners, brand engagement, media relations” (advertorials in local papers?);
• Madhouse – very vague as well.

It is clear that a company targeting a vast market likely employs multiple agencies to do the job. Due to NDAs and obvious issues arising after the penalty we may never find out who stood behind the campaign that failed – or if we do, it might be quite messy. Regardless, SEO has possibly just become more difficult, or so it looks. In any case, SEO is not an activity one can do unless they know exactly what they are doing and where it might lead, and this penalty just makes it more obvious again. Google sets the rules and it will continue slapping companies even if it is just to make a point, and it can be very misleading. More and more often we are seeing these damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t situations and what’s considered safe and “whitehat” today may come back to bite you tomorrow, what with more shadowy setups.

ADDED: I’ve been told that it was a common practice for Interflora to set up sites for their local dealers and at least some of the network sites do look like legitimate dealer sites, however this is still a dodgy setup. This could and should have been done better. Apparently, things like this are likely done inhouse rather than by external agencies – so there, we have one more possible suspect to blame. Another topic to discuss in this regard would be the relationships between brands, their inhouse teams and external agencies – I think I’ll do another post on this.

Wordpress Plugins Tag Cloud

When in a tag cloud the most used tags are “widget”, “plugin” and “post”, you can tell right away we’ve got a problem. (I could talk more about the drawbacks of this “maximising exposure” strategy and how plugin developers could benefit more from better targeting their potential users by better classifying and describing their plugins – but that’s a whole separate topic and it’s not the purpose of this post.) Infact, “sitemap” is not even present anywhere in this tag cloud.

Using search in the plugin directory doesn’t help much either. There are 180 results for “sitemap”, 106 results for “xml sitemap”, and 80 results for “google xml sitemap”. There are several ways of sorting these results:

Sorting the results by relevance is really the only way to get anything meaningful out of it as, due to poor classification, all other options show a bunch of plugins that have nothing or very little to do with sitemaps. “Most popular” or “Highest rated” could have potentially been a great way of telling what plugins are the best out there – but we’re really comparing apples to oranges there. So for the sake of this review post, here’s what I decided to do.

I have tested several xml sitemap plugins that are not news sitemap plugins, or multisite plugins, or video or images sitemap plugins – just plain and simple xml sitemaps. I have not tested any bundled plugins offering multiple functions (“all-in-one SEO plugin” type of thing) just to compare comparable things. I have tested them all on the same  WordPress installation, removing the previously created XML sitemap physically via FTP after each completed test. Here is what I got as a result.

The first one I tried was Google XML Sitemaps 3.2.9 by Arne Brachhold. It seems to be the most popular plugin, with over 9 million downloads and an average rating of 4 1/2 based on 3,449 ratings. It is also most frequently updated. This plugin has settings allowing the user to indicate what pages to include in the sitemap, whether to ping the search engines with updates each time an entry is added to the sitemap, whether or not to calculate the page priority automatically. Once the sitemap is built, the following report is displayed:

The generated sitemap seems to come out just fine and even has XSLT (XML stylesheet) associated with it. One thing that rubs me the wrong way though is this snippet that appears before the actual URL list:

Credit surely should go where credit is due but considering this, it looks a bit like a footprint to me. Maybe to some it’s of little concern but I’m a bit too paranoid for this stuff. No complaints about the functionality though – it does what it says.

Next one to test is Google XML Sitemap plugin by Cor van Noorloos. Oh well… Version 0.1.1, last updated 6 months ago, just over 42,000 downloads, average rating of 5 stars based on a whopping 3 ratings (doctored?)… Upon installing and activating it, I could not find any hint to a way to configure it in any way, be it in settings or anywhere else. After much digging, I looked at the readme file and there was the installation instruction, saying I just need to activate it and open mysite.com/sitemap.xml. However, I got a 404 there. The sitemap file never got created. There is hardly any compatibility issue on my side as the plugin says it requires WordPress version 3.3 or higher and is compatible up to 3.5 which is exactly what I tested it on. Looks like it just fails to activate. So much for all those downloads… and apparently people for whom it did not work do not bother leaving negative reviews. Complete fail. If you come across a plugin like this better uninstall it right away (and not just uninstall but also delete it) because in the worst case who knows what it can do instead of what’s advertised… This one didn’t do anything at all so seems like just a non-working plugin – but you can easily get something pretty malicious the same way. Truth be told, WordPress Plugin directory is supposed to kick out malicious plugins but how efficient this process is, I cannot comment.

Next up is Quick XML Sitemap by letsfx. Rated 5 stars by 2 raters, downloaded a bit over 9,000 times, compatibility might be an issue for me as it supports WordPress versions 2.3 or higher but said to be only compatible up to version 3.3.2. Once installed and activated, you get this settings screen:

Oh well, no option to withhold category pages or archive pages or tag pages from the sitemap… doesn’t look good already. It does spit out a properly formatted XML file with no imposed links to the author site or anything in there, but seems to ignore the priority settings – even totally omits them in random cases. So while this could be a quick way  to generate a draft sitemap which you would later edit manually, this is probably not an option you want to use on a frequently updated site as you would have to redo it manually all the time and you better be quick as the sitemap pings the search engines, and if you have certain parts of the site blocked by robots.txt, this plugin will cause you a lot of extra headache from all the Google Webmaster Tools crawling warnings.

My verdict: none of the plugins reviewed is perfect. There is not much choice out of what’s available as standalone WordPress plugins for generating XML sitemaps anyway. If you’re more experienced with all the settings and tweaks your best option would probably be to just use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin (however, even this one is not impeccable in terms of leaving a footprint – this is the result of a search for the little commented out credit it inserts in your pages and you gotta just pray that Joost de Valk stays up his game and keeps the plugin secure and  impenetrable for the hackers looking for footprints of massively used plugins) – but if you feel intimidated by its massiveness and multitude of options and settings then you’re pretty much left empty handed. Quite surprising, considering the sheer volume of WordPress based sites out there.

]]> http://www.irishwonder.com/blog/2013/02/07/wordpress-sitemap-plugins-reviewed/feed/ 0 http://www.irishwonder.com/blog/2012/11/20/my-and-contentmangos-adventures-at-svc2baltics/ http://www.irishwonder.com/blog/2012/11/20/my-and-contentmangos-adventures-at-svc2baltics/#comments Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:06:23 +0000 IrishWonder http://www.irishwonder.com/blog/?p=280 Those who know me in person have probably heard me mention that since speaking at SEMDays in Romania earlier this year, I’ve been toying with an idea of doing something similar in Lithuania for the local SEO community . Well, I’ve finally got a great chance to do it at the Silicon Valley Comes to the Baltics, an event for the Baltic startup and tech community.

Within this event, I did an introductory SEO session for students and a few business owners interested in figuring out this whole SEO thing (slide deck here) – I believe everyone in our industry should do one like that every once in a while, it helps you connect with the real world and explain what you do to the outside people. Sort of a reality check and a good exercise.

Another thing I did was run a workshop for 20+ Lithuanian SEO professionals. This is still a young community with hardly anyone in the industry longer than 3-4 years, but I have seen their willingness to learn and we had a great session and covered a lot of burning issues worrying SEOs worldwide, like the latest Google updates, the ways SERPs are changing, international SEO, best tools for all kinds of tasks etc. I am really happy to have met you all guys and hope we’ll get to do this once again some time.

In the meantime, the organisers have surprised me by offering to showcase ContentMango as part of the startup pitches session. That was really cool as I got to speak in front of about 1,500 people and I tried to fit the format of my pitch to the rest of the session: here is the problem, here is the challenge, the solutions that exist now and why they are not very good, what we came up with and why it will be a win for everyone  concerned, how we got an investor because they faced the same problem. Here is my tiny deck of slides that was done literally in five minutes on my iPad – but the whole pitch had to fit into 5 minutes as well.

Among the highlights of the event were the opening speech by the Lithuanian Prime Minister (and all the speakers got to get a photo session with him ), many wonderful speakers such as Gigi Wang the mom of startup events, Diane Bisgeier from Mozilla, Bowei Gai, Samuel Pavin from IBM, funny as hell Tim West the Silicon Valley chef, Jonathan Nelson, Stefano Cutello of PastBook, Nicholas Sadron who did an incredible trick with the 4 eggs and 4 glasses and many others, lots of great startups talking about their ideas, a reception at the city council at the end of day 1, going to great places for dinner with other speakers, making friends with some wonderful people…

But the organisers surprised me once more at the end of day 2 when they asked me to be one of the mentors at the Startup Weekend the next day on to of Vilnius TV tower! This alone was worth going to Vilnius – this is the most brain intensive thing I’ve done in a long while. There were the best startup teams selected on the previous days working on their startup ideas, and the mentors had to give them different tips/consult them. We got 10 minutes per team, and to me this basically meant I had 10 minutes per team to understand what it is they do, figure out the need for online marketing there and work out a mini online marketing strategy for them. My result: 7 teams, 70 minutes, 7 online marketing strategies! My brain was smoking afterwards but it was a very cool experience.

Some notes on the striking difference between a typical SEO conference and a non-SEO conference like this one:

• Social media, while making its way into non-SEO industries, is not quite as popular as what we’re used to seeing. At SEO conferences, the hashtag is trending in the first 30 minutes or so – here, I tweeted like 5 times and people already were telling me “oh, I’ve seen you tweeting about the event – you tweet a lot!”
• This is a logical result of the first observation but people are less concerned about their social accounts and how many people will follow or friend them. I think I was the only person with my Twitter account mentioned on my slides.
• There has been some discussion in the SEO industry recently if then talks at conferences should be in the TED format or not – while at non-SEO conferences a bigger % of talks seems to be TED-styled, it seems more logical (at least to me as an outsider).
• At SEO conferences, regardless of the facts that often we all know each other for ages and many of us are friends even outside of the professional realm, you cannot get rid of the feeling that you are surrounded by competitors, hence you end up kinda self-censoring what you say/share (at least until you’ve had a few drinks ) – it feels totally different at a non-SEO conference like SVC2Baltics. Even the presenters speak about the openness in the startup community (would have made @madeale completely happy). There are reasons of course – to us, SEO is THE business model, to startup people, their business model is not being a startup but whatever it is they actually do, but it still does feel great.

Overall, it’s been a very enlightening experience to me. I never expected to see even half of what I have seen, and surely never expected it all to be so intensive and me being as involved into it as I ended up, coming over only to do two SEO sessions but finding myself doing so much more. I’ll make it a point now to attend non-SEO events every once in a while.

Here’s the story. We have recently launched a Facebook page for ContentMango as we are getting ready for its launch and went public with it, only for me to find that I am not able to invite any of my Facebook friends to like it!

How come, you ask? No, it’s not Facebook banning me just like Google+ did a while ago. What actually happened was this: I first created the page back in August before we were ready to show it to the public and just put it into the private mode. While doing this, of course I refused the Facebook page setup wizard’s suggestion to invite my friends to the page – and as a result, it appears that the feature was disabled for me altogether!

Typically, when you are inviting people to like your page, the button for it would be here:

In my case, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Reading Facebook help docs did not help either – the case was not described anywhere. This was a totally undocumented glitch and no preset way to resolve it. What I had to do in the end is go to my browser’s saved cookies and delete all cookies associated with Facebook – and bingo, it worked! I had to relogin as it kicked me out, but at least I had the functionality back and was able to use it now.

By the way, if you’re reading this, don’t forget to go to that page and like it and also sing up at ContentMango to be the first to know when we launch

But how do you approach content creation? Not everybody is a writer, nor does everybody have the time to write. I’ve been there and done that, tried all different approaches, had content developed for a thousand different purposes, heck I even ran/still run a copywriting service of my own. Below are several common approaches and their pros and cons.

1. Hire an inhouse writer to work on your content.
Pros:
- Guaranteed content;
- Controllable working environment;
- As the writer learns about your business and your niche, he/she is likely to develop a deep understanding of what content you need, what are the most important issues for your business, your market and your industry.
Cons:
- Ongoing maintenance costs – whether or not you need content today you still have to pay your writer’s salary, provide a working place for him/her and cover any other costs involved;
- It takes time to find a good copywriter;
- The approach does not scale easily if at some point you need more content.

2. Assign the task to somebody in the existing team.
Pros:
- No extra costs;
- The person will already be familiar with your business specifics.
Cons:
- The person will no longer do what they used to do before getting the copywriting task – this might not be a problem if you only need a copywriter temporarily but if the task is ongoing you are likely to end up looking for someone to replace this person for their original functions;
- Are they really skilled enough for the job?
- Same issues as with hiring an inhouse copywriter apply here as well.

3. Outsourcing
There are various flavours of outsourcing content creation, from hiring third world freelancers on oDesk/other freelancing sites to contracting a professional copywriter with a name and fame, with a lot of other options in between.
Pros:
- You get it done. Eventually. For some price. With varying degree of quality. Maybe you get it done.
Cons, depending on the actual outsourcing route you take:
- Questionable quality;
- Possible lack of topic research;
- It can take substantial time to complete your copywriting order – in the worst cases it may never get completed, too;
- Lack of scalability;
- High volumes of content or high quality copywriter may end up being quite pricey.

Lately we (me and Ralph Tegtmeier a.k.a. Fantomaster) have been working on a solution that would address all the cons of each approach as much as possible while giving website owners, SEOs and all other kinds of online marketers access to all the content they will ever need without eating up their entire budget. The solution is called ContentMango, we made a pre-launch appearance with it at BrightonSEO last month. I am estimating that it is going to be launched closer to the end of this year, for now you can sign up at the launch page to stay tuned for future announcements.

If your site gets infected a notice appears in Google next to it in any SERPs where your site is present:

For some fiercely competitive industries, infecting other sites with malware is an everyday practice.

But even if your site does not belong to one of these industries, it does not mean you are immune to malware injections. For the record: malware injection and site hacking is NOT black hat SEO, this is just destructive actions of certain individuals that can actually be qualified as criminal offense in many jurisdictions.

How do sites get infected? This happens due to vulnerabilities either on your host’s side or your actual site / CMS you’re using. A widespread example of the latter would be outdated installations of WordPress with unfixed security flaws.

According to Stop Badware (a site we will get back to shortly in this post), the three most common types of badware affecting sites are:

1. Malicious scripts
2. .htaccess redirects
3. Hidden iframes

How you can diagnose malware on your site: if you did not see the notifications in Google, many browsers including Firefox display a warning when you are trying to access an infected site.

Also, if you have a Google Webmaster Tools account connected to your site, there may be a warning there.

I am not a fan of Google Analytics for a number of various reasons, but I do advise every site owner to keep track of their sites via Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have that, you can check your site in a number of resources like WOT (more on this later). Finally, if you see a traffic drop without visible loss of rankings, one of the possible reasons could be drop of CTR from the SERPs due to a malware warning – instead of going to your site directly, the visitors get from the SERPs to a page like this:

(the URL of this page would be something like http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://www.yoursite.com – remember this one as you can use it later to verify that the warning has been removed).

Once you have confirmed your guess, you need to remove the malicious code off your site. The “Details” link in the GWT warning message will take you to a page listing the actual malicious code, so now your task is just to find it on your site and remove it. Using your FTP client, access your host and list the files in the order of the last change – if your site was hacked/altered recently the modified files are likely to be the ones with a recent change date. You know when you last made any changes to anything on your site yourself, so likely for most site owners this will be a good indicator. If that doesn’t work, or there is a number of files recently modified on your host, download a backup copy of your whole site to your computer and search for the code in question. On a Mac, you can easily search for anything inside any file (just choose the “Contents” option when searching in your Finder). On a PC, I’ve been told that Google Desktop search can do the same but cannot really confirm it so try it yourself. Finally, if you have any site development tools like Dreamweaver or any other framework where you can open a site as a project, most of the frameworks will let you search for a code snippet within a project.

After you have removed the malicious code, make sure to fix whatever security hole let the malware get into your site (an SEO security audit may be a good step to take to identify all your possible vulnerabilities). It’s also a good idea to change all your passwords (your hosting account, your CMS, your database – everything you can think of). When done with this step, you can submit your site for a review via Google Webmaster Tools to have the malware notification for your site removed from the SERPs.

Earlier, I have mentioned StopBadware.org. It gets its information from a number of sources:

StopBadware is important because it is responsible for the information available to the browsers. Until its data updates, your visitors will still be seeing a warning in their browser. Google is one of the sources and it’s the fastest one as all the updates there happen automatically. As for others:

- Web Of Trust is based on users’ ratings and is generally not a very reliable source of information (its data can be spoofed, and it’s only as accurate as popular a site is with its members)

- SiteAdvisor is a service by McAfee and it’s generally slower than Google as well

- same about other sources.

So, while Google updates your data, you don’t have to wait and can ask StopBadware for a review as well, directly. Same thing works for those who do not have a GWT account for their sites.

Once the site is reviewed both by Google and StopBadware, the warnings in Google SERPs will disappear, the Google warning page will return a 403 error, and there will no longer be any warnings in the browsers for users accessing the site.

Has your site been infected? Have you had any different experience removing the malware or had problems getting the warning in Google/browsers removed? – please share your story in the comments!