WP Upgrade from free site to address security issues
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Our free WP wordpress has been flagged by Google for generating suspicious bot activity. The issue could not be addressed. Is switching to a paid version a viable alternative and if so, could the existing site simply be upgraded or will it need to be rebuilt because of the bot issue?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
Upgrading your site won’t make any difference if it’s blacklisted or otherwise flagged on Google’s end. The only way to fix this is to appeal the flag with Google directly so they can review it on their end.
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Thanks, Kokkieh. Steps taken with Google were not successful. Before moving to a premium website with WP (and rebuilding the site under a different URL then), we’ re trying to assess whether paid subscriptions really improve the security factor. Any information on this topic is appreciated.
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@ottawaquadsession would you be willing to share exactly what Google said was wrong with the site? If there’s a true security issue we’d like to address it, but we weren’t able to find an issue here.
Also, can you confirm that this is with ottawaquadsession.wordpress.com ?
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Thanks Supernova. This is the warning we received. Google offers an option to scan and solve the issue. It reported that the process failed.
New issue detected on https://ottawaquadsession.wordpress.com/
Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 new issue of type Coverage.
Top Warnings (5 maximum)
Warnings are suggestions for improvement. Some warnings can enhance your appearance on Search; some warnings can become errors in the future. The following warnings were found on your site:
Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt
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Okay, yeah that sounds like it’s just a warning and it didn’t mention anything about a suspicious bot that I can see.
And usually when folks see that message about robots.txt, it’s telling them it’s unable to index the back-end nuts and bolts of the site. You wouldn’t want it to since that would certainly not boost your keyword relevance, so we block wp-admin and a few other directories here:
https://ottawaquadsession.wordpress.com/robots.txt
But all of the content Google and any of your users are supposed to read is fully available.
Robots.txt, by the way (if that’s where you got the worry about bot activity) is just a file that tells search engines what they’re supposed to put in search results and what they’re supposed to leave out. Think of robots.txt like you would signs at a gallery — you’re welcome in this room and that, but this other room is for employees only.
And it sounds like Google is saying, “Hey, we’ve indexed what we could, but we ran into a few areas of the site that were blocked by this file, just FYI.”
If you’re getting any other warning messages, let us know, otherwise I’d think it’s safe to go ahead and ignore this one.
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