Thanks very much Keith. I've just edited the file as suggested.

I see the error but as I am the web guy I cant' figure out how to get rid of it.

I think it might be a plugin that's causing it so I'm going to disable the and re-able them one as a time.

I've just PM'd you by the way.

Thanks for your help Keith.

Colin

Thanks Keith.

Only part of our site is WP based. Would that be a problem using the example you kindly suggested?

Hi Guys,

Thanks so much for your help. As you say Troy, that's defintely not what I want.

I assumed when we were hacked (twice in 8 months) that it might have been a competitor as we are in a very competitive niche. Might be very wrong there but we have certainly lost our top ranking on Google.co.uk for our main key phrases and our now at about position 7 for the same key phrases after about 3 years at number 1.

So when I saw on Google Webmaster Tools yesterday that we had a severe health warning and that the Googlebot was being prevented crawling our site I thought it might be the aftereffects of the hack.

Today even though I changed the robot.txt file yesterday GWT is showing 1000 pages with errors, 285 Access Denied and 719 Not Found and this message: Googlebot is blocked from http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/

I've just tested the robot.txt via GWT and now get this message:

AllowedDetected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictionsSo maybe the pages will be able to access by Googlebot shortly and the Access Denied message will disappear.I've chaged the robot.txt file to

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 20But should I change it to a better version? Sorry guys, I'm an online travel agent and not great on coding and really techie stuff. Although I'm learning pretty quickly about the bad stuff!I seem to have a few problems getting this sorted and wonder if this is a part of why our page position is dropping?

Thanks very much Matt.

Thanks Matt. I take your point.

We've added a number of security measures to the CMS but it looks like we havent' successfully added enough.

Your suggestion to search the platform specific communities is really useful.

Cheers.

Hi Matt, thanks for replying.

I have looked at Verisign but wonder if it's comprehensive enough. (If there is such a service).

I wonder if Verisign's service would flag up or better still prevent something like my robot.txt file being altered by a malicious script?

Or whether the malicious script would not have been able to access my site if I was with Verisign?

Colin

Having been hacked twice and, it seems, still suffering from problems as a result (file changes and alterations, etc) I'm wondering if there is a good paid service that provides security for websites?

I'm an online travel agent so our websites "up-time" and search engine position is vital but I'm spending more time trying sort out our websites' security than selling travel.

It would be sensible to pay for a service that would ensure, as much as possible, that our site is secure and any optimisation we do is not cancelled out by hacking and security problems.

If anyone could recommend a good company I would be very grateful.

Colin

On our Google Webmaster Tools I'm getting a Severe Health Warning regarding our Robot.txt file reading:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 20

User-agent: 008
Disallow: /

I'm wondering how I can fix this and stop it happening again.

The site was hacked about 4 months ago but I thought we'd managed to clear things up.

Colin

Thanks Ian, Irving and Ian,

I take your point about controlling what I can control and your right.

Just frustrating to watch after following Googles recommendations. But, as you say, there might be other factors.

Thanks guys.

Off now to kick the cat!

(Just joking).

Colin

I wonder, after all the talk of Penguins and Pandas if anyone has seen evidence of a competitor who you know has 1000's of spammy links removed from their page one position in Google.

I have a trade competitor who appeared from nowhere about 12 months ago with 11,000+ back-links most of which were totally unrelated to our trade and appear to be link-farm links for the most part.

After reading about Google's changes I thought the site might be hit but it remains up there in the first 2 or 3 results on page one.

I wonder if anyone has seen similar sites penalised?

Colin

Thanks very much George.

I had spotted that but wondered if anyone had any other permutation that had worked for them.

I think I'll follow the settings suggested on that page.

Cheers,

Colin

After suffering a malware episode I wonder if there is an optimum setting for the file permissions for a typical Wordpress site?

Colin

Thanks Majid,

Sucuri Scanner looks good. I wonder if you had any experience of it?

If it can remove the malware as well as alerting me of any future hacks it would seem money well-spent.

Colin

Thanks Marie (and Dan and Majid),

I am going through the plugins and widgets now. I re-installed a clean version of the Theme too but not sure if I've done that too soon if the script is still there.

I can see the page titles in Webmaster Tools but cant' find the actual pages on the server to delete, in case that helps.

I will definitely look at the security suggestions and resources suggested. Thanks for the tips.

Marie I will PM you too if I may.

Thanks guys,

Colin

Google has identified Malware on on eof our Wordpress sites. In webmaster tools it names the 10 pages where code has been injected.

I cant' find them easily via the WP dashboard and wondered if anyone had had any experience of this and what steps they took?

Plus are there any measure I can take to fight against this? The site is on the latest WP version.

Thanks,

Colin

Thanks very much Sarah and thanks for the link and recommendations. I'll look into it today.

Plus the Extended Validation.

That's really kind of you.

Kind regards,

Colin

Thanks so much Jason. I'll take a look right now and be back with a Thumbs Up I'm sure.

Colin

Hi William,

Just getting it checked out now.

Colin

In Google Webmaster tools after doing a Google Fetch for our Blog which is showing Access Denied for 900+ pages this is the report that comes up and I wonder if this is causing the 900+ pages to show "Access Denied" and if so how to rectify it?

The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop. Please check the Help Center article about redirects.```
<code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/blog/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 07:04:05 GMT
Content-Length: 157

<title>Document Moved</title>

Object Moved

This document may be found here

I</code>

Hi Jason,

I can visit those pages in Google browser.

Colin