What should I do if my website is blacklisted?

It is possible for a hacker to enter your web server without doing noticeable damage and you may not notice data loss or any change in performance; however it does not mean that everything is going smoothly as these hackers use compromised accounts to distribute malware lately.

Malware is malicious software that can be integrated into the pages of your website and infect your visitors, this can be done by a hacker by injecting the malicious code into a database or web page templates so that visitors are redirected to other sites or download Trojans inadvertently.

If an online antivirus detects a website hosting malware, it will blacklist this site from its database of malicious pages. Users using this antivirus will see warnings when visiting the infected website.

Google also has a list of malicious sites that it detects when it crawls and indexes its search engine and provides them to popular browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera. Browsers that use its blacklist will block infected sites.

Entering a black list in one of these ways destroys the reputation of a website and will generate a considerable drop in the number of visitors. Search engines will also stop indexing your website from appearing in search results, seriously hurting your website traffic.

You can check the reputation of your website by visiting VirusTotal and to check Malware reports you can access ImunifyAV from the cPanel of your hosting account.

After the website has been cleaned, you should remove it from the blacklists as soon as possible.

How do I remove my website from blacklists?

This process is not automatic. You must manually request to be excluded from the blacklists. To do this, you must submit your website to all the antivirus providers listed below.

Depending on the antivirus vendor, the process can take up to a month to complete; in the meantime, you need to make sure your site remains malware-free.

A site will only be whitelisted when the following requirements are met:

It is clean (free of Malware);
A report has been sent;
The antivirus company approves the report;
This company removes the domain from its database of malicious domains;
The antivirus vendor publishes a new update or the end user updates their antivirus databases

These are the approved antivirus vendors that accept blacklist removal submissions, either by uploading links, as email requests, or by filling out a form.

Antivirus Companies

(Uploading URL)

AVG

BitDefender

Avira

Dr.Web

SpamHaus

(Sending form)

McAfee

Avast

Sophos

Trustwave