nomadicfrog

I’m not sure what the difference is between basic indexing and “optimizing” is, so I’m not sure how to make sure I understand.

My understanding is that text content on a page will be indexed by search engines. What I don’t understand is how the FAQ text is…visible? to the search engines. Is all of the content …loaded, but just hidden from human viewers until they open an accordion?

I can imagine there is a difference between basic indexing vs more advanced “optimizing”. I need it to be indexed, but I’m not sure I need more advanced optimizing. So I’m just not sure how to ask or understand your first answer.

Thanks for your help!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by nomadicfrog.

I had hoped this was a relatively straightforward question. I’m sorry, but I just don’t quite understand how the FAQ content is loaded – and hidden by the accordion folds – and how well or badly Google is able to see and index that content.

Regarding the database: I figured as much. Problem was, given my level of non-expertise, I don’t know what’s legit and what isn’t inside the database. Looks like I might have gotten most of it, at least – my Google search results are gradually cleaning up!

Since starting this plea for help I have completely changed hosting providers, upgraded PHP, learned a little about how to troubleshoot WordPress problems, and fixed a couple of problems that have been nagging me, costing me money, and making me look very unprofessional for a couple of years. It took a week or so, but I’d say it’s been worth it.

Thanks again!

I did submit my WordPress URL to Google to re-crawl…about 36 hours ago. I realize Google moves at Google’s pace and stoops to us commoners when it deigns to, but it does mention somewhere that the re-crawl usually starts within 5 minutes of submission. Kinda thought I’d see the effect by now, but if I search Google for “nomadicfrog.com” the results still include all sorts of pharmaceuticals, and when I check the “cached” version it states a date that is well before my re-crawl request.

Anyhow, so if Wordfence is now working correctly, I guess this thread is done (and a huge thank you for your help and patience).

But I do have one question, just so I understand in the future: I guess I expected Wordfence to find problems in the database as well – is that not the idea? I was hoping that a clean scan meant I was completely clean, and not that I would have to pray that my nearly-nonexistent SQL skills don’t destroy my entire site.

I don’t mean for that to sound grinchy – I know I’m using the tool for free, and I am grateful for it and your support – I just want to know for sure what it does and what I still need to expect to do myself in the future.

And on that last note, I do want to do this myself as much as I can, and avoid paying hundreds of dollars, but I would certainly compensate you / Wordfence for the time spent helping me here, if that is possible somehow?

I tried working through these suggestions and found and deleted some database entries.

When I go to “Fetch and Render as Google” I now get different – slightly better? – results. For “How Googlebot sees the page” I no longer see Amoxicillin garbage, but for “How a visitor would see the page” it is still there. (Before deleting the database items both sides looked the same.)

I’m fried, gotta go to bed. Let me know if log files, diagnostic reports, screenshots of Google’s fetching, etc. would be useful and I can send them in the morning.

Ok, so I seem to be up and running on InMotion’s servers now. (InMotion, btw, seems to be amazing – tech support, migration, everything has been super fast and very friendly.)

Pretty sure I am now using PHP 5.6.24.

I did the first step in the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT documentation you sent me, and added the line to wp-config.php. When I look at the Diagnostics page the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT went from 40M to 256M, so I assume it worked?

As for steps 2 and 3 on that page, not sure I’m supposed to mess with those if making that change to wp-config.php accomplished the goal. Right?

And, I just ran a scan. It seemed to take 21 minutes, and it says “Scan complete. Congratulations, no problems found. Scan Complete.”

I just used Google’s webmaster tools to Fetch and Render as Google on a known problem and the Pharma Hack still appears. Not sure what to do next.

I posted my last reply and then found out that the WordPress forums were down for maintenance – my reply must have disappeared into the ether.

What a drama since then. I actually signed up with Bluehost, paid for the migration, then found out that they don’t support a little email feature that I need (enabling a catchall account – long unrelated story). So I canceled that and signed up with InMotion.

They should migrate my site…eventually, and I’ll get back to cleaning up the hack then – with PHP 5.6 and increasing the memory limit.

I’ll report back whenever they get done with the migration!

I will send the .htaccess file and the Report to you in a second (thank you!)

No, I have not ever gotten a scan to complete. As far as I can see on the scan page it hangs on “Scanning for infections and vulnerabilities” and “Googles Safe Browsing List”.

I have been through the My Scans Don’t Finish page seriously 10 or more times, and I think I’ve tried everything on it, plus several other forum posts and info I can find on the web. (I think I’ve described the steps I took to follow those suggestions in this thread, too, for reference.)

Just fyi, I’m heading out into the wilderness for a few days, so I may not be able to do anything on Wordfence while I’m gone. I was hoping to have this resolved first, and I will pick it back as soon as I return, but just so you know, if I don’t respond quickly it’s not for lack of urgency on my part.

At the risk of bumping, here’s more info about .htaccess files. I think there are five of them within the WordPress installation folder (which back then I named “journal”)

/journal
/journal/wp-content/plugins/akismet
/journal/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/lib
/journal/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/tmp
/journal/wp-content/wflogs

I don’t know much about these files. Can I safely delete them? Do you want the contents of them here to see if there is a problem? I don’t know what to do, if anything.

Should I also be checking outside of the WordPress installation?

I wasn’t aware that I was bumping – I don’t post much in these forums, and I was trying hard to follow the rules. In any event I didn’t, apparently, bump for 24 hours after my first inquiry with no responses. Anyhow, sorry that I caused a problem, and thank you for chiming in.

I just deleted 4 inactive plugins and then disabled all (13) plugins other than Wordfence. I ran a scan with debugging turned on.

It still seems to hang on scanning for infections and vulnerabilities and Googles Safe Browsing List. The last log entry was, at the time I’m typing this, about 25 minutes ago (everything in the log for the current scan happened within 3 minutes).

I’m not 100% sure what all are error messages, but here are some things that don’t sound good. (I’ve included a few log file lines before and after the error. Let me know if there is a better way to format them here (code? b-quote?)

[ Moderator note: code fixed. Please wrap code in the backtick character or use the code button. This includes log data. ]

[Aug 26 12:10:22:1472227822.227509:4:info] Scanning contents: wp-content/uploads/2008/05/MG_1261.jpg (Size:105506B Mem:34.8M)
[Aug 26 12:10:22:1472227822.215027:4:info] <strong>Scan process ended after forking.</strong>
[Aug 26 12:10:22:1472227822.107055:4:info] Scanning contents: wp-content/uploads/2008/05/MG_1261-590x393.jpg (Size:58831B Mem:34.8M)
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[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.610781:2:info] Starting scan of file contents
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.225725:4:info] Calling Wordfence API v2.23:https://noc1.wordfence.com/v2.23/?v=4.6&s=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nomadicfrog.com%2Fjournal&k=c793ee73ae51f1b08d90ba13bb2085eb5759c245db9f153222d3ad57407f6c998051abbf710fd3c3e40d10127e09052a05bc03fc1d10e6a1ccd4cc9d3845e6142f33a0e3474181a1d2168dc3d79e8f90&openssl=9469999&phpv=5.2.17&betaFeed=0&cacheType=0&action=get_patterns
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.220186:10:info] SUM_START:Scanning files for URLs in Google's Safe Browsing List
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.217446:10:info] SUM_START:Scanning file contents for infections and vulnerabilities
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.210819:10:info] SUM_ENDOK:Check for publicly accessible configuration files, backup files and logs
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.199602:10:info] SUM_START:Check for publicly accessible configuration files, backup files and logs
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.154319:10:info] SUM_ENDOK:Scanning for known malware files
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.151715:10:info] SUM_ENDOK:Scanning for unknown files in wp-admin and wp-includes
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.149285:10:info] SUM_ENDOK:Comparing plugins against www.remarpro.com originals
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.146811:10:info] <strong>SUM_ENDBAD</strong>:Comparing open source themes against www.remarpro.com originals
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.143694:10:info] SUM_ENDOK:Comparing core WordPress files against originals in repository
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.142417:2:info] Analyzed 5438 files containing 340.61 MB of data.
[Aug 26 12:10:05:1472227805.128621:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/xmlrpc.php (Mem:41.8M)
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[Aug 26 12:09:55:1472227795.750540:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/position.min.js (Mem:41.8M)
[Aug 26 12:09:55:1472227795.745240:4:info] <strong>Scan process ended after forking.</strong>
[Aug 26 12:09:55:1472227795.738623:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/mouse.min.js (Mem:41.8M)
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[Aug 26 12:09:29:1472227769.502749:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IMG_0722-310x150.jpg (Mem:41.8M)
[Aug 26 12:09:29:1472227769.495055:4:info] <strong>Scan process ended after forking.</strong>
[Aug 26 12:09:29:1472227769.275608:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/MG_8618.jpg (Mem:41.8M)
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[Aug 26 12:09:02:1472227742.975689:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/neal_parent_003_crop-310x150.jpg (Mem:41.8M)
[Aug 26 12:09:02:1472227742.965567:4:info] <strong>Scan process ended after forking.</strong>
[Aug 26 12:09:02:1472227742.942900:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/neal_parent_003.jpg (Mem:41.8M)
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[Aug 26 12:08:34:1472227714.612388:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/dawson_fractured_002-310x150.jpg (Mem:42.2M)
[Aug 26 12:08:34:1472227714.602776:4:info] <strong>Scan process ended after forking.</strong>
[Aug 26 12:08:34:1472227714.596034:4:info] Scanning: /home/content/t/o/r/torchbone/html/journal/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/dawson_fractured_002-213x300.jpg (Mem:42.2M)

As for .htaccess file(s) – I am currently trying to delete 6GB of other non-Wordpress stuff from my server, which is taking forever, and when it’s done I’ll search for all .htaccess files.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Fixing formatting

I’m really not sure why I’m bothering with this, but I’ll keep adding what I’m doing to try and help myself.

So, I’ve also now tried enabling “High Sensitivity” scanning, not that that would fix the problem, but at least I’ll be extra thorough if and when I actually manage to complete a scan.

I tried disabling config caching at the bottom of the Diagnostics page…but now I don’t even see that checkbox at all. Not sure where it went, but I unchecked it after reading this page.

Happened to see that a new version was, coincidentally, released today doing away with config caching. Nice timing to help me think I was really losing my mind. I mean, I’m already talking to myself.

So, I did in fact read the “read this before posting” post, and did my best to comply with these two slightly contradictory requests:

“Please keep your posts as short as possible.”

“Make sure and post all relevant details. Hosting environment (Windows, Linux?), error messages, last thing you did right before the site blew up, etc. are all good things to include.”

Obviously my original post isn’t “short”, although much of the length is from including some debug log entries as I have seen WF reps requesting. In short, I tried to include my environment what I’ve done to try and help myself, and anticipate questions, keeping it as brief and clear as possible. Even tried to be helpful and maybe ID a place where the documentation could be clarified.

“We do read every post that appears here and we make every effort to give you a timely response. We value our free community as much as our paid customers.”

I see dozens of responses from the community and WF representatives in recent hours – even many resolved issues – but my original post from nearly two days ago gets nothing?

Site is https://www.nomadicfrog.com, so if you search Google for site:nomadicfrog.com you’ll see some of the “Amoxicillin for Sale” and “Ketoconazole Cream For Sale” stuff.

[ No bumping please. ]

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

More info:

Wordfence has detected issues in the partial scans that have in fact run. I resolved some by deleting unused themes and plugins, ignoring some known theme changes (yeah, I didn’t modify them in the proper way myself). I also deleted two suspicious files.

But as far as I can tell the Pharma Hack also involves database entries, and I haven’t seen anything about cleaning those in any Wordfence scanning so far.

I have also looked through documentation about using Google’s Webmaster tools, and while under Security it says “Currently, we haven’t detected any security issues with your site’s content” it does seem like some pages still contain Pharma Hack junk when fetched in the right way.

…and I’m now at the limit of my understanding of what to do and how to do it.

Another update: I have disabled ALL of my Firefox plugins, re-installed Firefox version 3.0.10, cleared my cache, still not working.

FWIW, the Image Chooser has always been extremely slow to load, even in IE. Maybe something is just timing out now? But why Firefox and not IE…?