Hi, I’m Brent Curry with TinyFrog Technologies, search marketing specialist, today is the second part of our series about when websites are blacklisted, basically a quick how-to on fixing a blacklisted site. So your site’s been blacklisted now what do you do. Basically this could be a very confusing and overwhelming process for any business owner. You know your website is the source of life blood, purchases, clients, etc., the website is now down and you have no idea how to fix this. It can be a very frustrating process. It sounds simple but if you aren’t a developer some of this can be very complicated. But at its core, we basically need to find what the issue is, in the website, you know where is this malicious code, where did it get hacked, what got added, we need to remove the issue and we need to then resubmit the site for review with the search engines.
In most cases, if you have it, it is desirable to have a backup of your website or multiple backups that you can refer back to to try and find a clean version. Kind of pre hack, pre edition of malware that you can then just reinstall and go from. That’s probably the easiest way to kind of handle this problem but in many cases depending on the type of hosting that you have you may not have backups available. Maybe they weren’t taken. It’s just not part of the service. So in those cases you may need to hire a developer or engage a developer to really scrub the website, rebuild it and reinstall it for you. The process once that’s done, the process of resubmitting varies depending on the particular issue that it was flagged for, but they all involve going to the Google search console tool and going through a resubmit process.
One thing I do want to highlight, once you’ve been hacked, unless you take additional steps it’s very highly likely that you’re going to be hacked again. You’re going to have the same problem again so think about the frustration that you’re going through. You want to avoid this. We highly recommend that clients use a secure hosting service that includes monitoring, security, and backups for this very reason. Protect yourself from this ever happening, but if it does happen you have those backups so the fix is very quick. If you do want to talk about secure hosting services for your WordPress site we’re always happy to have those conversations. Please hop over to our contact page by clicking HERE. Once again Brett Curry with TinyFrog Technologies.
