This Site De-listed on Google Due to Wordpress Flaw

A few weeks ago, I saw a notice that there was a security flaw in Wordpress that needed patching. Unfortunately, I've been dealing with lots of stuff that trumps site maintenance and I didn't get to it until last week.

Apparently that was too late because as I sat down to upgrade/patch Wordpress, I saw that one of the most recent posts (one on the front page) had tons of spammy text hidden from view with CSS. As that was a telltale sign of having the site exploited.

So, I quickly changed a bunch of passwords and went looking for other posts that had similar text in them and found none. Having cleaned up the mess, changed passwords and upgraded Wordpress, I moved on.

Then, yesterday, I checked in on my Adsense revenue. I only do that once every couple of weeks as it's pretty consistent. What I saw was disturbing. The number of page impressions was WAY down. As I had more pressing matters to look at (it's tax season, ya know), I made a mental note to check it out in more detail this morning.

It was then that I found that the drop in traffic actually dated back to April 3. On every day since then, the traffic was a fraction of normal. Instead of hanging out just south of 3000 page views a day, it was closer to 500. Uh oh.

I headed to the normal site stats and noticed that somehow, MSN's Live.com was now the highest source of referrals. Hmm. Where were the Google links?

Sure enough, a search for "site:wynia.org" returned absolutely no results. Yikes.

I went looking for an explanation and discovered that I wasn't alone. Others had been booted from Google because of their Wordpress installation getting hacked. A few more searches and the comments on that past revealed that I needed to use the Google Webmaster Tools to resubmit the site.

I did that, but am uncertain exactly when or if the 1000+ pages of this site will reappear in Google. That's because there's no way to actually test whether you got all of the offending content. They just give you an "example" of the kind of thing that got you de-listed.

They just point you to the webmaster guidelines. That's all fine and good if the reason you were removed was deliberate action. However, in this case, even Google indicates that they know it wasn't a result of my actually building the pages this way:

"This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party."

Beyond that, from what I can see, it was that single post on the front page of the site that triggered the blacklisting. A single page out of 1000+ (that was up in it's incorrect form for less than 48 hours) causing the complete removal from the index is something that strikes me as not exactly in keeping with the motto "don't be evil".

So, I guess what I'd really like is if anyone sees this problem here on the site, PLEASE let me know so I can get this all cleaned up.