Have you ever tried to access a website but instead got a warning against malware deception or phishing?
This red, flashy warning comes from the search engine. Search engines like Google, Bing, Safari, etc blacklist websites if a threat is detected. Some of the threats are:
- Scam
- Malicious activities
- Fake Anti-Virus
- Unwanted program download
- Faulty or vulnerable plugins
- Phishing activities
- Plagiarized content
- Blackhat SEO
Therefore, once a website is hacked, the search engine categorizes it as dangerous and produces a warning to the visitors. This could happen to any website. As a website owner, you need to know how to identify blacklisting and get your website out of it.
How to do a website blacklist check?
One way of checking for blacklisting is by simply looking up the website on the search engine. The warning pops up instead of directing you to your website. Apart from this, there are some symptoms you can look out for:
- The antivirus program blocks a part of your website
- The hosting server suspends and disables your account out of the blue
- SEO spam keywords and external redirects
- Changes in the database and appearance of new files
While being blacklisted, you’re likely to lose customers as users cannot directly access the website. They met with a warning instead, and this might scare them from trying any time later.
Usually, cleaning up the malware and infected files on your website and then submitting a report to the search engine will get you off the hook.
Astra’s Website Blacklist Scanner
There are so many search engines and you need to make sure that your website is accessible on all of them. As you can imagine, looking up the website on all the search engines is tiresome and time-consuming. Even if you do this exercise manually, the efficiency of the results is doubtful. So, it is definitely not worth the time or effort because you can just use Astra’s website blacklist scanner.
Source: getastra.com
Astra is a web security solution provider. Some of their prominent clients are Gillette, Cosmopolitan, Ford, Hotstar, etc. They have also helped secure tech giants like Microsoft and Yahoo.
Amongst other security tools, Astra Security offers a free website blacklist scanner that scans your website thoroughly to confirm website blacklisting across 65+ search engines like Google, Bing, Avast, McAfee, etc. Within seconds, the results will be ready.
After confirming the website is blacklisted, it also points you in the right direction for the remediation of the situation and in fact provides you steps and guides to fix the issue.
In case you need assistance fixing the website blacklist or other hack issues, Astra’s team of robust security engineers will do it for you under their immediate malware removal plan in less than 6-8 hours.
Besides, Astra Security Suite is an extensive security package with a wide variety of features. An iron-clad firewall, brute force protection, machine learning powered malware scanner, and so much more for affordable prices. As far as blacklisting is concerned, Astra Security Suite scans your website every day automatically to identify blacklisting. However, it’s unlikely for the website to get blacklisted on Astra’s watch.
Conclusion
Search engines blacklist websites that are considered dangerous to users. It could be because malicious content was detected on the website. There are only a few tools that can accurately confirm blacklisting on multiple search engines. Astra’s website blacklist scanner is one of the best. It scans across 65+ search engines and produces results instantly. It is free to use. The icing on the cake is the technical support they provide to remove the blacklisting and to secure your website. It is definitely worth a shot.