Thousands of websites are blacklisted by google everyday, In pursuit of keeping its index free from websites with Malwares and Phishing content, Google deindexes and cautions visitors of such websites with bold warning. For a website owner, dealing with the technicalities of fixing the hack, securing your website and requesting a review could be daunting. In this article we have listed ways to quickly restore your website, remove the blacklist and get your traffic back.
There are various reasons why a website could be blacklisted by Google. Some common reasons are:
Malware or phishing
If your website is found to contain Malware (harmful software) or is engaged in Phishing (tricking users to reveal sensitive information), your website will be blacklisted
Black Hat SEO
If you intend to rank on SERP by using tactics such as keyword stuffing, hidden text or link schemes commonly known as black hat SEO, exercise caution as you may end up on the blacklist.
Copyright infringement
Websites that repeatedly violate copyright laws by hosting or distributing copyrighted content without authorization may be blacklisted.
User-generated spam
Websites that allow user-generated content, such as comments or forum posts, but fail to adequately moderate or control spam or malicious content, may be blacklisted.
If your website is blacklisted, it can have a significant impact on its visibility and traffic. To remove a site from Google’s blacklist, the website owner needs to address the issues that caused the blacklisting, such as cleaning up malware, removing spammy content, or resolving copyright violations. Once the necessary actions have been taken, the website owner can submit a review request to Google from the search console for reconsideration and removal from the blacklist.
How did my website end up on the Blacklist?
Website owners do not want their website to be penalized and lose search traffic, but tens of thousands of them end up on the blacklist every day, and possibly for no fault of their own. Most small business websites are built using WordPress, while it’s a very practical and cost effective way to get online, it uses a community of developers around the world to keep it up to date and requires the use of multiple 3rd party plugins to get desired features. If the WordPress core or those plugins aren’t kept up to date then it’s possible that someone could use a backdoor or a security vulnerability and get access to your website and install Malwares and Phishing components. Here are some things one needs to keep an eye out for while managing a business WordPress website :
- Keep your WordPress core up to date
- Regularly look for available updates and update all your plugins
- Exercise caution while sharing your admin password
- Keep your password strong and change it regularly
- Avoid quick spammy ways to get ranked on searches
- Avoid use of content copyrighted content
Equally important is to have a website built that practices best standards. Check out the details of our website designing services in Sydney.
How to remove your website from Google Blacklist ?
If you are getting a warning message on your website then your site has been blacklisted by Google. Here is what you need to do to avoid being penalized further and fix your website.
1)Go to Search Console
The first thing you need to do is to verify your domain to prove ownership if you already haven’t. Once your website is added to your search console as a domain property, Google will list any security issues your website has along with links to the pages and the nature of the issue at hand. Alternatively you can also go to Google transparency report website and use the tools to verify the blacklist and its nature.
2) Make required changes
After you have established what is causing your website to be blacklisted, the obvious next step is to get on about solving the issue at hand. It could mean you need to do a lot of things but the most common ones would be to find the hack or malware injection on your website and remove it. One trick that makes it easier for you to locate and remove the trouble files is to sort your folders by the date in which they were last modified. Once you have sorted it you will have all the folders that were changed recently as opposed to the ones you uploaded. You can then manually go through the list and remove all the suspicious inclusions that are not put up by you. This works in most cases of WordPress hacks but for some instances of major compromises, manual search and removal might not work. In that case you might have to pay for an automated plugin or a software like Malwarecare or Securi to scan and remove those elements from your website. One of the easiest way about this could be to replace the entire website with a backup copy of your website but that could also mean that you lose all the online changes to the content that was done.
3) Request a review
Once necessary changes are made and you are satisfied that you have removed everything of concern and the website is safe, you can request google to review the changes you made and have your website removed from the Blacklist. The turnaround time for these requests are around 24 hours but could take up to 5 days. If Google is satisfied that the changes you made to your website resulted in the removal of codes that caused the issue, It will then remove your site from the blacklist and restore it in the search index.
Once your website is restored, always keep in mind that this could happen again and the next time might not be as easy to fix. Exercise caution and use safe practices to keep your website up to date, devoid of copyrighted materials and always be cautious with who gets access to your website.
At Uniweb, we have an experienced team of security experts to help you remove your website from Google blacklist and secure it in a way that it never reoccurs. Contact our security team in Sydney for Malware removal and Blacklisting issues you have. Call us at 02 8003 7308
