About three weeks ago our blog was flagged by Google and StopBadware.org. Our traffic dropped right off due to the warning “Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!” placed in our listing on Google. We got right to work on solving the problem but soon found our site delisted.

It took a while to track the problem down. The information on StopBadAware.org was very vague. We updated our version of WordPress, but that didn’t help. We then requested a review from StopBadware.org and it took a while to get a reply. The piece of offending exploit code came from a third party WordPress Traffic Statistics plug-in we installed (don’t even know where we downloaded it) that tracked stats through WordPress.org and inserted a bit of code at the footer of our posts in an iframe.

Once the Stats plug-in was removed we requested that Google review our site and the message was removed within 24 hours. Unfortunately, our PageRank and first page ranking have not been restored. I did a search for our site today and we’ve completely vanished from Google.

In our quest to resolve this issue we encountered quite a few other WordPress bloggers who had been flagged by StopBadware.org and Google. We’ve vowed never to download another plug-in from any sites other than the WordPress site.

We welcome your input. If you know of any problem plug-ins please share them. The one that caused all the mischief in our case was simply a file in the Plugins folder labeled stats.php.