What are Blacklisted Websites? Can They Harm My PC?

While surfing the Internet you must have often come across a warning message of the kind “this website could be harmful for your computer”. Renowned search engines use advanced virus databases to identify potentially harmful websites and detect malwares on them which can be fatal for visitors. Therefore, it is extremely important to understand and take these warning signals seriously. While browsing, if your search engine displays such a warning it means that the particular website is blacklisted.

Google blacklisting could occur due to a number of other reasons, keyword stuffing and content duplication being few of them. Moreover, it could also occur if you send several emails to numerous prospective customers to promote your website. In that case, one of the receivers of these promotional emails might report your website and email address as spam. Though, this kind of blacklisting is less fatal than Google blacklisting your website, but it still is a matter of immense concern.

The Internet is extremely diverse and vast. There are numerous websites and even more Internet users. This gives the hackers and malicious intruders an opportunity to exploit innocent web users and clean websites over the web. They may compromise an inherently safe website and load it with malware or convert it into a phishing site. In this situation, Google recognizes such a website to be responsible in distributing viruses and blacklist the same. Therefore, whenever you attempt to visit a web-page which is compromised and is blacklisted, you get a warning message.

Of course, blacklisted websites are harmful. They are put in such a list to forewarn and protect you from viruses, malwares, as well as phishing scams. Blacklisted websites are not only risky for the unsuspecting web users, but also not good for the one’s involved in creating and maintaining the same. They, without any fault of theirs, have to bear the consequences of website blacklisting in the form of reduced traffic and affected credibility.