How to keep your WordPress website off Google’s blacklist:- Do you seen a sudden change in your website traffic? Weird advertisements for shady products that highlights on your pages. If you are hypnotic in agreement, it’s possible that your site is missing from index. May be has blacklisted your site, because it consider your site unsafe for visitors. To prevent this happen for your site, it’s important to know how to keep your website off Google’s blacklist.
What is Google’s Blacklist?
Search engines like Norton Safe web, Bing, McAfee SiteAdvisor etc strive to offer best possible search experience to users and google is no different. Google continuously keeps eye on malicious content on websites that potentially harm visitors. Then it quarantines these websites.
Google doesn’t publish any official blacklist, but it continuously scours the internet for potential threats. It then de-indexes these unsafe websites to safeguard visitors. Webmasters need to pay a great attention to this as it leads to heavy loss of traffic.
What makes Google consider a website unsafe?
Google look for many aspects before taking your website out of reach to visitors. Sometimes it happens due to algorithm changes but more often it is because of security or other issues that needs to fix.
- Viruses or Malware in host servers or on your computer or network.
- Low quality, pornographic or junk content, controversial /illegal content, content that is copied or violates copyright policies.
- Hosting phishing or scam pages
- Building backdoors, sending backlinks, buying or selling links.
- Redirecting to other pages.
- Linking malicious or spammy pages.
- Unclean seo practices like making keywords or over optimization of keywords.
This can trigger penalties from Google, including removal from search index.
How to keep your WordPress website off Google’s blacklist
What happen if your site is blacklisted?
The most impact of being blacklisted is drop in visitor count. Besides serious revenue loss, the website’s reputation and credibility can also take beating. Google begins to finish warning and once you are blacklisted, it can be a long road to recovery.
10 Signs that your website is blacklisted by Google:
- Google display warning for your visitors that your site is possibly compromised or potentially unsafe.
- Your site loads an unsafe page or your homepage redirects to another url.
- Warning message such as “This site may be hacked” or “This site may harm your computer, Do you want to proceed?” begin to flash.
- Seo spam links & redirects in SERPs.
- Searching your site on Google returns weird pages or ads.
- Email start to bounce.
- Weird keyword searches for shady pharma products land on your webpage.
- Unfamiliar popups start to show, weird ads, spammy content appear on your website.
- Your browser loads weird content from external sources.
- Your site slows down visibly.
Tips to keep your website off Google’s blacklist:
- Install firewall & run anti-virus software’s regularly.
- Cleanup your website & remove malicious content.
- Avoid linking to spam sites as well as selling or buying links.
- Ensure original content without keywords stuffing.
- Select hosting package carefully.
- Update WordPress regularly, use reliable themes & plugins.
- Change username and password regularly.
- Secure wp-config.php as well as .htaccess file.
- You must be familiar with Google’s term and conditions & keep up with the algorithm changes.