Can Website Monitoring Services Prevent Your Site from Being Blacklisted?

Being blacklisted from the search engines is one of the worst possible things that can happen to an online business. It has been estimated that more than half of all website traffic is generated through search engines. If your site becomes blacklisted, you lose access to all of that traffic. Being blacklisted can literally bankrupt an online business. To prevent this from happening, you need to understand what being blacklisted means, what can put you at risk of being blacklisted, and how you can prevent it from happening.

What Does it Mean to Be Blacklisted?

When you are blacklisted from a search engine, your website will not show up in that search engine's search results. The majority of website owners don't need to worry about their sites being blacklisted. If, however, your site is hacked by a hacker who replaces your site's content with malware or alters your content to include malware in your site's pages, then you run the risk of being blacklisted from the search engines. If the search engines crawl your site after it has been hacked by a malicious hacker and malware or spam content is found, your site will become blacklisted rather quickly. Once your site is blacklisted, it can be an uphill battle to get your site back into the search engine's search results. Some sites are never able to accomplish the task. In such cases, an ounce of prevention is definitely worth more than a pound of cure.

How Can You Prevent Your Site from Being Blacklisted?

Oftentimes when a hacker gains access to your site, your site's performance will be impacted. If you have quality website monitoring services in place, you will be notified if there are any performance issues with your site the moment the issues begin. If a hacker has gained control of your site and has begun to wreak havoc on your site's pages, you can immediately take steps to mitigate the damage and prevent your site from being blacklisted before the search engines have a chance to crawl the altered content. While most businesses turn to website monitoring services to ensure maximized uptime of their websites, reducing downtime is not the only benefit that such services have to offer. Quality website monitoring services can also protect your search engine rankings and can, in some cases, help prevent your site from being blacklisted due to unethical hackers who would destroy your site's reputation (and search engine rankings) with spam content and malware.