Score:-1

Google keeps blacklisting my site

cu flag

My site is constantly being blacklisted by Google. I have a WordFence Care (paid) account. WordFence has repeatedly scanned my site completely, reporting every time that the site is clean. When I request to be removed from the google blacklist, the site is cleared a few days later. And then a few days after that it's blacklisted again.

This sick game has been going on now for almost 2 months.

Is the WordFence security scan bad? Or is there an issue with Google?

Google does not give me examples of pages that are infected according to them. It says N/A.

Apparently this is a serious security issue. But I am not aware where the real issue is...

Any suggestions?

Score:1
jp flag

No security tools can detect & remove all possibly harmful content. You could complement the WordFence by some other scanning tool. Knowing how the malware typically gets installed on WordPress sites is also helpful. As the malware may not show as a distinct add-on, a powerful way to clean it up might be:

  1. installing the WordPress from scratch
  2. reinstalling all the plugins from trusted source and
  3. migrating the content from the current database.

You could also find the extra files by comparing the files on the site with files on clean installation packages.

Sometimes the harmful content is hiding from the administrators. You could try to explore the site without signing in and see whether it differs from what you see when signed in. Looking at the source code (Ctrl+U) or the Network tab on the browser's developer tools (F12) might also reveal something.

I have also seen content that could be considered harmful but is only visible to Google. Changing the User-Agent to one of the Googlebot User Agents might make the harmful content visible. This was used for generating links for the Google Bot to follow and increasing their rank on the Google results. However, this has been decreasing since Google started handling this link spam the opposite way.

Finally, it might be a good idea to delimit on a firewall level the external sites your site can access. That way you can avoid your site from spreading any malware to other sites. Infected WordPress installations are used to infect more WordPress sites.

jp flag
I also found a [blog article from Karishma Sundaram](https://www.malcare.com/blog/remove-google-blacklist-warning/#why-has-your-website-been-blacklisted-by-google) regarding this issue. It does advertise a WordFence's competitor, MalCare, but the general parts of the post are relevant to your question.
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