Did you know that when Google indexes your site and copies your content for the index, it also checks your site for malware?

If you are marked as suspect,  you get a suspect site tag, and it will affect your sites rankings.

A common side effect of a WordPress hack is malware being inserted into your site to download viruses or redirect your innocent site visitors to a nefarious site.

Chaka Khan Let Me Rock You

Singer Chaka Kkan’s site was hacked and marked as suspect, when this happens, you will see this additional line added to your search results

Browsers

Certain browsers like Google chrome and Firefox are keyed into this suspect site system and if you click through to a site marked with malware a huge red screen appears warning you that malware may infect your machine.

Imagine if your clients or site visitors see that?  It only takes seconds to ruin your reputation and that definitely would ruin you.

Check To See If You Are Marked As Suspect

There is a very simple way to see if Google has marked you as suspect, and that is to use the following URL, replacing the red text with your own domain.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://neilm.wpengine.com/

What Do You Need To Do

You need to clean the malware from your site and then ask Google to reconsider your site and remove the malware stigma.

If you open a Google webmasters account from google.com/webmasters, under the diagnostics->malware tab is a reconsideration request form.

Hack Recovery Course

I cover this topic in much more depth in module nine of my hack recovery course.  Check out this page for full details WordPress Hack Recovery Course