If your website has some unusual activity that means your WordPress website is blacklisted. The website get flagged because malicious content added to your website. If any cyber-attack occurred on your website, search engines and antivirus vendors blacklist your website.
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By chance if your website gets blacklisted then your website will have a very bad impact that will lower down your website’s reputation.
On the internet, trustworthiness is considered as the biggest factor because user trusts in you so that they get a valuable product and services.
A customer never wants to download the malwares content from a website so that their credential details will be stolen. If your website is marked as a blacklisted no user will prefer to use your services and products.
Suppose your website is flagged by search engines or any antivirus vendor you dont have to worry because there are some ways to get your website back as it was.
So in this post, we will read more about the blacklisting and the ways to do when your website is flagged by different search engines.
What are Blacklisting and its intention?
Blacklisting is a process which creates a list of website that is included with malwares content. Most popular search engines like Bing and Google along with the antivirus vendors like Norton, McAfee, etc flag your website as it can be harmful for users.
Most probably blacklisting is good practice. Because it protects the users by downloading malware content from the website that has a cyber attack. Blacklisting prevents user’s information from being hacked.
Blacklisting occurs when your website has a cyber attack or it is hacked. Even if the WordPress website owner is not done anything wrong on the website then also there are 100% chances of getting the website blacklisted.
The reason for blacklisted can be a cyber attack that has located malware on your website.
If your website is flagged then you might face so many difficulties and problems because as soon as the visitor visits your blacklisted website they will get a warning message hence visitors will not access your website anymore. This will increase the bounce rate and minimizes the conversion rate.
If search engines have blacklisted your website then it will lower the visibility of your website on Google. Hence you will face low traffic.
The website can be flagged due to cyber attacks. And this can be very problematic for you. It is your responsibility to prevent your user data from being hacked. For this, you can establish some security measures.
5 different action to perform when your WordPress website is blacklisted
If your WordPress website is blacklisted it means your website reputation and SEO results are causing ruin. These are enough situation to leave a negative impression in front of users. But still, there are some possibilities for getting back your website’s reputation and visibility.
Step 1: What is the status of blacklisting
If your WordPress website has got poor search engine ranking that means your website has something usually activity.
You should immediately check if your website is flagged by search engines or antivirus vendors. The best way to check your website is blacklisted or not is to check the status of your website by using the ‘Safe Browsing site status’ tool.
You just have to visit this tool and enter the URL of your site. If your website has some malware content it will show as unsafe content else it will give a small message that your website has ‘No unsafe content’.
If you want to check deeply then you can visit the ‘VirusTotal‘ tool. This tool will check your website in deep against 66 blacklists.
If any of these tools generate warning it means your WordPress website is blacklisted.
The users of ManageWP has the benefit of using a free plugin that security check. One will be able to check the website is flagged or not by going to security then click on web trust.
You can see the blacklists on your website and it will be easy to resolve quickly.
Step 2: Eliminate malware from your WordPress website
If you have found that your WordPress website is blacklisted then you will be surely looking to remove all that malware. Good news for you, you have a wonderful solution to improve your website flag.
Sucuri is the best plugin that avails all the ManageWP security check features. This plugin works very effectively which gives you access to scans all the malwares present on your website.
Free Sucuri version is also available that will monitor the status and help you to resolve the problem.
Step 3: Submit the report and await for whitelisted activity
Once you have resolved the issue you need to submit the report to vendors of antivirus or to the search engines to flag your website.
But to submit the request to Google search engine you need to have a Google Webmaster account so that in search console they can verify your website.
After verifying the account, log in to it and go to the security issue section. You will be able to see some messages if any type of attacks, malware is detected on your wordpress website.
Step 4: Enhance the security to avoid forthcoming blacklisting
It is the best way to prevent your website from future attacks by establishing some security measures. Adding Sucuri or ManageWP means you have already taken first step towards security.
But there are more ways to enhance more security levels like update themes and plugin, installation of web application Firewall, use a strong password, add two-factor authentication, change a setting, and more.
Step 5: Recreate your website visibility and reputation
The most difficult part of this scenario is to reestablish the reputation that you lost when your WordPress website was blacklisted. The main motto of reestablishment reputation is to increase the traffic and decrease the bounce rate.
The best way to rebuild your reputation is to create a social media, blog, outlets by mentioning your website was blacklisted and now all malware has been solved.
Conclusion:
Blacklisting is not a awful or wicked. Rather it alert your users from unsafe browsing. But make sure to whitelisting your website as soon as possible.
Sonl Sinha is a passionate writer as well as WordPress and WooCommerce rockstar who loves to share insights on various topics through his engaging blog posts. He runs a successful website design and digital marketing company. With 15+ years of experience in WordPress theme development, he strives to inform and inspire readers with his thought-provoking content. He helps thousands of small and medium businesses and startups create a unique online presence. Follow Sonl Sinha for your regular dose of knowledge and inspiration.
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