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For bloggers, it is very challenging to protect their blogs from external malware attacks or hacks. Despite using so many protection, we become the victims of such attacks. A few days back, I found such issue with my site. While opening my site on Google Chrome, I found it was giving this malware warning message to my visitors – The Site Ahead Contains Harmful Programs (as shown in the image below). I tested and found it was working fine in other browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc). It means my site was flagged by Google as suspicious. If any visitor has checked ‘Enable phishing and malware protection’ in his/her Google Chrome browser settings, he/she was getting this message – The Site Ahead Contains Harmful Programs. Today I am writing this article to show how to fix this issue if you face with your site.
Steps to Fix The Site Ahead Contains Harmful Programs Issue
- Visit this link – https://aw-snap.info/file-viewer/
- Enter your site URL in URL bar (as shown below. I have used my site URL for reference)
- Click on ‘Scan’ Button.
- It may take some time to fetch the results. Once it displays results, you will be able to see where your link is redirecting. You can see if it is pointing to any unwanted links. In my case, I could see why Google flagged my site URL. The issue was one of my ads was forcing to download some application/software on visitor’s machine. Thus, Google declared my site URL as suspicious.
- Once you find the issue with your site, you can easily rectify the issue (as in my case I removed the malware causing ad from my site)
- Also, It is recommended to see how your site is behaving at Safe Browsing Diagnostic page.
- To check, visit this below link – https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=catchupdates.com
- You need to replace site URL (catchupdates.com) with your site URL.
- Once you open this, you will come to know if your site is listed as Suspicious in Google or your site has hosted any malware. If your site is listed suspicious, you will find the reason there itself that Google says this site contains harmful programs.
- I am sharing a snapshot of my site. Now my site is not listed as suspicious by Google anymore. But if you will have a look below, you can still see what was the issue with my site (Highlighted Below).
- Now you have found the issues and rectified (as in my case I removed the ad from my blog), next step is to tell the Google to unflag your site so that visitors can visit your blog without any hesitation.
- To do so, Open your Google Webmaster Tool Account (I am assuming you already have your account at GWT).
- Go to ‘Security Issues’ from the left navigation bar.
- There also you will find issues with your blog (Generally, a detailed description of the issue you found at Step 9). I am sharing snapshot my blog when I faced this issue.
- Tick checkbox ‘I have fixed these issues’.
- Click On ‘Request A Review’.
- That’s It ;)Once you have submitted your site for review, it will take few hours to resolve this issue. After that, Google will unflag your site and it will be no more listed as suspicious.Once malware warning is removed, you will get a message in your GWT dashboard as shown below –
Also, you can go to ‘Security Issues’ section again and see if the issue is resolved.Once this issue is resolved you are good to go and visitors can visit your site without any malware warnings.That’s all in this article. If you have faced this The Site Ahead Contains Harmful Programs earlier, what did you do? Do share your views and feedback in comment section below. Also, do share this article with your friends!
Mohit Arora
You can connect with me on Instagram Or Quora And Linkedin as well.
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It is a good practice to check for harmful programs on a your site regularly because a site with many problems will be a source of frustration for the visitors, It gives the impression that you don’t do regular housekeeping, It can harm your credibility as an authority, It could affect your website conversion if it’s on a sales page, and It can hurt your SEO and page rankings. Thanks Mohit for sharing this info.