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How to Use Google Malware Checker to Keep Your Website Safe

Let's talk about a website owner's absolute worst nightmare. You wake up one morning, you make yourself a nice cup of tea, you sit down at your computer, and you go to visit your own, beautiful website. But instead of being greeted by your familiar and your welcoming homepage, you are met with a terrifying, a full-screen, and a blood-red warning from Google that says something like, "Warning: This site may harm your computer."

In that moment, your heart just stops. Your stomach drops. A wave of pure, cold panic washes over you. Your website's traffic will have just plummeted to absolute zero. All of your potential customers and your loyal readers are being scared away. And your hard-won and your valuable, professional reputation is, at that moment, in tatters. Your website has been hacked.

Now, it is so easy for us, as the owners of small businesses or of personal blogs, to fall into the trap of thinking, "Oh, that will never happen to me. Only the big, the important, and the famous websites get hacked." But the hard and the unfortunate reality is that hackers will often use automated and sophisticated tools to be able to target thousands and thousands of small and vulnerable websites, all at the same time. So how can you check to see if your website has been secretly and silently compromised? How can you get an early and an important warning, long before Google's own robots do? You can use a simple, a powerful, and an instant diagnostic tool to be able to scan your site from the outside, in exactly the same way that Google does.

The "Digital Boogeyman": What is Malware?

Before we get into the easy solution, let's just make sure that we are all on the same page about what this "digital boogeyman" that we are so afraid of actually is. The word "malware" is, quite simply, just a shortened version of the phrase "malicious software."

And this malicious software can come in a number of different and of nasty forms. It could be a classic virus or a trojan. This is where a hacker will hide a piece of malicious code on your website that can then be used to try and infect your visitors' own, personal computers. It could be a phishing scam. In this scenario, a hacker might replace your real, and your legitimate, login page with a perfect and a fake copy of it, in an attempt to be able to steal all of your customers' usernames and their passwords.

One of the most common types of hacks that we see today is SEO spam. This is where the hackers will secretly inject thousands of hidden and invisible links to their own, spammy websites, often for things like online casinos or for fake pharmaceuticals, directly into the pages of your website. They are trying to be able to steal your website's hard-won authority and its good reputation. And in the absolute, worst-case scenario, you could become the victim of ransomware, where the hackers will completely lock you out of your own website and they will demand a payment to be able to give you back the control.

Your Reputation on the Line: The High Cost of a Hacked Site

As you can imagine, the consequences of having your website infected with any of this nasty malware can be absolutely and completely devastating for your business and for your brand.

The biggest and the most immediate problem of all is being blacklisted by Google. If the Google search engine detects any kind of malware on your site, it will, for the protection of its own users, immediately add your website to its "Safe Browsing" blacklist. This is the thing that triggers that big, scary, and red warning screen that we talked about earlier. This means that your organic, search traffic will drop to absolute zero, in an instant.

But even after you have fixed the technical problem, you will still have to deal with the loss of your customer's trust. This is something that can be much, much harder to be able to recover from. If a potential customer ever gets a virus warning from your website, there is a very good chance that they will never, ever trust you or your brand again. And, of course, if you are running an e-commerce store, a hacker could potentially be stealing all of your customers' personal and their financial information, which can lead to massive and to devastating, legal and financial liabilities for you.

The Manual Check-Up: An Impossible Task

So, if the threat is so serious, why can't you just go and "look" for the malware on your website yourself? Well, the simple and the honest answer is that malicious code is, by its very nature, specifically and brilliantly designed to be hidden.

The malicious files and the scripts that a hacker will place on your site are often buried deep, deep within your website's thousands of different files, or they might be hidden away in your website's database. They are almost always hidden in a way that is completely and totally invisible to a normal and a casual visitor.

You cannot just browse your own, live site and expect to be able to see it. By the time that you start to see the obvious and the visible signs of a hack like a bunch of weird and of strange pop-ups, or some content on your site that has been defaced the infection is already very, very severe. This is why you need an external and an automated, scanning tool to be able to check your site's health for you.

The "Outside-In" Approach: How a Malware Checker Works

This is where a modern, an elegant, and an incredibly simple online tool comes in to save the day. The way that these tools work is actually very clever. The tool acts like a specialized and a very security-focused, web crawler, in much the same way that the Googlebot itself does.

You simply give the tool your website's URL. The tool's powerful bot will then visit your site, from an external and an independent location, and it will perform two, main types of checks. The first thing that it will do is it will check your site against a number of known and of public blacklists. The most important of these, of course, is Google's own, massive, and constantly updated "Safe Browsing" database. This is the master list of all the websites on the internet that Google has already identified as being dangerous. The second thing that it will do is it will scan the actual code of your page. It will look for the known, digital "signatures" of thousands of different, and of common, malicious scripts, it will look for any suspicious and any hidden redirects, and it will look for any of the other, common signs of a hack. It is like having your own, personal, and on-demand security guard.

The Simple, Instant Health Check: The Google Malware Checker

This pressing need for a fast, for a simple, and for a completely reliable way to be able to get an objective and an external, security opinion on our website's health is exactly why a Google Malware Checker is such an absolutely essential and an invaluable tool for every single website owner.

This type of tool is a simple, diagnostic utility that is able to leverage the power of Google's own, massive "Safe Browsing" API, along with a number of other, security databases, to be able to give you an instant and a clear report on the current health of your site. The workflow is an absolute dream. You just go to the tool's website. You will see one, single, and very clear input box. You just have to enter your domain name. You click the "Scan" button, and in just a matter of seconds, the tool will give you a clear, a simple, and an unambiguous verdict, which is usually either "Clean" or "Potentially Unsafe." And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of free and instant tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can run this crucial and important, security check any time that you feel that something might be wrong.

What to Look For in a Great Online Malware Scanning Tool

As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best and most trustworthy ones are designed to be fast, accurate, and incredibly easy to use. They are built to give you the peace of mind that you need, without any unnecessary fuss. A really top-notch online tool for scanning your website for malware should have a few key features. It should include:

• The ability for the tool to be able to check your site against the official and the always up-to-date, Google Safe Browsing blacklist.
   
• A fast and a highly reliable, scanning process that is able to give you a clear and an unambiguous result in just a few seconds.
   
• A simple and an intuitive interface that only requires you to be able to enter your website's URL to be able to get started.
   
• A clear and a helpful explanation of any of the potential threats that it might find on your website.
   
• A tool that is completely free, that doesn't require you to do any kind of an installation, and that respects your privacy.
   

A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any modern and for any serious website owner.

The Human Webmaster: What to Do if the Scan is Positive

So, what happens if you run the scan and the tool gives you that dreaded, and that heart-sinking, piece of bad news: your site has been flagged as being potentially unsafe. The first and the most important thing to do is to not panic.

Your very first step should always be to immediately contact your web hosting provider. They are the experts in this area. They have their own, more powerful, server-side scanning tools, and their security team can often help you to be able to identify and to remove all of the malicious files from your site. Your second step is to immediately go and to change all of your important passwords. This includes your website's admin password, your FTP password, and your hosting account password.

Your third step is to try and restore your website from a backup. If you have a clean and a recent backup of your website from a date before the infection happened, restoring that backup is often the fastest and the easiest way to be able to fix the problem. And your final step, once you and your web host are absolutely certain that the site is completely clean, is to go to your Google Search Console account and to submit a request to Google to be able to have them review your site and to remove that scary, red warning.

Proactive Prevention is the Best Medicine

Let’s be honest, in our modern and our sometimes-dangerous, digital world, the security of your website is not an option; it is an absolute and a non-negotiable necessity. A malware infection can be absolutely devastating for your business and for your hard-won reputation. A simple, online malware checker is a fantastic and a powerful, first line of defense. It gives you the ability to be able to perform regular and proactive, health check-ups on your own, personal site.

So, don't ever wait for that terrifying, red warning screen to appear and for your traffic to plummet to zero. It is time to be proactive about your website's health. By using a simple online tool to be able to regularly scan your site for any potential malware, you can catch any problems early, you can protect your valuable visitors, and you can maintain the sacred trust that you have worked so hard to be able to build. A safe website is a successful website. It’s time for your check-up.