Websites getting blacklisted is a very extensive problem faced by businesses. When it happens, web masters panic and the vendors face an interruption in their daily business as they struggle to assist their concerned consumers to clean their websites and return online. It can happen due to a variety of reasons. Even Google may blacklist a website, and on an average, it’s been estimated that about 10,000+ websites get blacklisted on a daily basis.
Getting to Know about the Mishap
Many businesses cannot afford to install costly monitoring programs or employ security experts and often take time to realize that their site has been blacklisted. Almost 50% of the business owners are warned about the compromised site by a search engine, browser or other alert when they try to visit their own site. Time is the biggest enemy of blacklisted websites as every minute that the site remains blocked is precious and leads to revenue losses due to the bad impact on its marketing activities and eventually sales and loss of the organization’s reputation.
Be Prepared to Deal with the Problem
It might take several hours or even days to get rid of the malware and protect a website based on the infection’s severity; it also depends on whether or not the website is secured by an effective and frequent backup regimen. The foremost part of the fix is eradication of the malware and restoration of the website.
Even after this process, the web masters have to request Google to review the site before getting the block removed.
Dealing with Black-listed Websites
Web hosts find it to be a nightmare to handle blacklisted client websites, straining their operations and possibly weakening their credibility. Clients generally fail to understand the reason behind the blacklisting of their site and tend to unjustly put the blame on their host.
Smart hosting vendors should extend assistance to their customers and help them get over the trouble at the earliest. Hosts that provide robust tools to solve the problem of their clients will finally instil a sense of loyalty and confidence in them. Vendors that lack these tools may waste considerable resources on remediation and in the process, even lose their valuable clients.
Blacklist remediation will not be an extensive ordeal if the affected site owners have smart automatic backup regimen in place as they can restore the functionality and files of the affected site easily with the right tools.
To help their clients, hosting vendors should be aware of the following remediation steps so that it can be implemented efficiently and quickly as soon as a client finds out that his website has been blacklisted.
Look for Malware
Check for malware by running efficient antivirus programs on all the computers used by an admin for logging into the website. Also, scrutinize the server logs for any activity by the admin whose computer is infected.
Change the logins and passwords for all accounts, including those of database access, FTP, CMS accounts, and system administrator. Ensure that strong passwords are set.
A sophisticated hosting provider should let their customers to make these changes easily on a dashboard interface.
Let customers know how important it’s to install the latest editions of Operating Systems, apps, blogging platform, CMS, and plug-ins.
Delete any new or modified file that has been added to the server after detection of the problem and execute a complete system restore. The restoration can be completed through a single click if you provide a cloud-oriented auto backup and disaster recovery services to your clients. If not, the clients will have to find the latest clean editions of each modified file and manually download them.
Request Google to Review the Site and Remove the Blacklist
This is the best way for hosting vendors to handle the remediation as soon as possible; just ensure that the tools required for getting a customer’s website back online are ready with you always.
