What is Website Blacklist – All You Need to Know [Updated 2020]

What is a website blacklist?

When crawling a website if search engines find malicious content, code or link on a website they blacklist that website. This makes that website unavailable for viewers for obvious security reasons.

Meaning a blacklisted website won’t appear in search results to prevent users from accidentally downloading malware.  

Finding out that your website has been blacklisted is no less than a nightmare because nothing kills your hard-earned traffic faster than getting blacklisted. 

Getting blacklisted can have a negative impact on your website’s reputation and credibility on top of that your website rankings take a major hit.

Reasons Websites are Blacklisted? 

The first thing you need to look into is the reasons for which you were backlisted.

Websites can get blacked for a number of reasons: 

• Using black hat SEO techniques to rank your site on search engines
• Third-party add-ons
• Adding plagiarized/copyrighted content to your website
• Insecure FTP connections
• Server level vulnerabilities
• Web application vulnerabilities

Who Can Blacklist Your Website?

Some major parties maintain the blacklists are:

• Bing
• SpamCop
• TrendMicro
• StopTheHacker
• Norton Safe Web
• McAfee SiteAdvisor
• Security companies like Sucuri 
• Search engines like Google, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Edge, Safari
• Browser manufacturers like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla 

How to Recognize a Website That Has Been Blacklisted?

Chances are that if you have been blacklisted you will know. 

Here are some warnings you will get when your website gets blacklisted. 

You may get different warnings about the site when it got blacklisted for malicious content or phishing, a most common warning is:

• Reported Attack Page!
• This website has been reported as unsafe
• The Website Ahead Contains Malware!
• Danger: Malware Ahead!
• The site ahead contains harmful programs
• The site ahead contains malware
• Suspected Malware Site
• Deceptive site ahead
• Suspected Phishing Site
• Website Request Forgery

Best Tools to Check if Your Site Has Been Blacklisted

Accepting that your website has been blacklisted is not easy If you want to verify whether your website been blacklisted or not you can.  

Go to Sucuri free website security check and malware scanner, add your website URL in the scan bar and hit go. 

If you are not satisfied with it yet, there are more ways to check.

VirusTotal tool

VirusTotal inspects your site with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blacklisting services & tells you whether it detected a malware or not and how different search engines are labeling your site.

Google’s Safe Browsing site status tool

Once when you are sure that your website is blacklisted. 

You must act immediately, without wasting any time!

First, you need to find out, why that search engine blacklisted your website.
If you act statically, it’s not that difficult. Just follow these points:

• Check the last visit of a search engine like when google last visited your website i-e: scan date.
• When it found the suspicious content i-e: discovery date. 

You can get these dates so easily when you check the paragraph i-e: What happened when Google visited this site.

• Match these dates with the date of the last attempt to clean up the site (cleanup date).
• Re-scan the website by Google Webmaster Tools.

By this,  Google will re-scan your website within a few hours and if there would be no issue then your website will be removed from the blacklist.\

In some cases, the site can be blacklisted but the scan date is more recent than the discovery date. It is important to correctly interpret this situation. Because sometimes, Google’s unofficial explanation is confusing.

The review may have found “suspicious” content that was not “suspicious” enough to have added the site to the malware list- but is “suspicious” enough to prevent it form being removed form the list.”

Google’ unofficial statement

Just go through the following points to secure the website and remove website from blacklisting. 

• View the Common Google blacklist warnings like on images.
• Identify the type of warning you are seeing on your site.
• Request a review.

Also, scan and find out why your website has been blacklisted.

• Remove File Infections
• Remove Malicious Domains and Payloads
• Prevent Reinfection
• Review User Accounts
• Identify Backdoors. ETC.

How to Get my Website De-blacklisted 

Is your website is blacklisted? Don’t worry, we are here to help you out.
One way is – Just leave everything on professionals. You can contact

WebARX security engineers by sending us an email to support@webarxsecurity.com or writing to live support chat on WebARX Security. If you are a Do it yourself person, simply follow these steps: 

Head To Google Console

If you already have an account. Excellent! Otherwise create your account first and get your registered.

Once, the website owner has been verified. You should go to your property and see what will it show. You should see a security issue warning on the screen. Open the report and go ahead.

Verify yourself first. It will either show you a green “ownership verified” notification or red “Ownership verification failed” notification. When you see the red one as seen below, you will usually get the failure reason and can act accordingly.

Clean Your Website

There are two options.

• To perform the malware removal yourself. You get a complete guide for it.
• Take help from professionals.

Wait! If you are not happy with this. We are suggesting another option. Sucuri! Sucuri platform also provides paid help from professional and help you to get out the issue.

Also, you can use ManageWP account to conduct malware scans on your website:

• To perform the malware removal yourself. You get a complete guide for it.
• Take help from professionals.

Wait! If you are not happy with this. We are suggesting another option. Sucuri! Sucuri platform also provides paid help from professional and help you to get out the issue.

Also, you can use ManageWP account to conduct malware scans on your website:

Here is a quick and fast way about it.  

• Restore website from backups 
• Remove affected files 
• Add fresh copies of them 

But sometimes it may be tricky and full of risk (by deleting any important file whose backup is not available). And is not a permanent solution as the vulnerability because of which you attack is still there. 

So, we suggest you either remove the issues by yourself or take help from professionals.

Question “One-Click Malware Removal” Tools And Services?

No doubt, there are many tools and services available which are giving one-click malware removal. Some famous ones are: 

1. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
2. Bitdefender Antivirus
3. Adaware Antivirus
4. Emsisoft Emergency Kit
5. super anti Spyware
6. Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool

These solutions are  Are you really want to available the one-click malware removal type services.

Although, they show the status fine after this. But it’s not reliable. 
We suggest you go ahead with Sucuri and WebARX security options. Take help from professionals or remove the errors by yourself. Let your site in safe hands.

Also feel free to email us if you need any WP Support.

FAQs