Have you checked to see if your blog is marked malicious?

I just learned something new... that my blog was mistakenly marked as malicious.  I didn't even know this could happen. Most of you probably didn't know this about my blog unless you have McAfee software on your computer (thanks to Kimba at the Caffeinated Book Reviewer for pointing this out to me).  Turns out since I kept changing my template on Blogger last night like at least 20 times (if you missed why I did that read about my template and comment crazyness ) it confused McAfee (at least this is what I think happened).  You may not even know it, but yours could be marked too.  If my followers had never pointed it out I would just be blogging like normal.

I learned that you can check if your blog has malware at McAfee Site Advisor.  If you go to this link there is a box on the right hand side where you can put your blog name or any blog for that matter and see their rating from McAfee.  I did this and of course my blog was marked (I think it might've thought I was hacked).  So then I went on the hunt as to why McAfee marks blogs as Malicious.  I didn't really find any specific reasons listed anywhere. There are a lot of reasons.  I am sure though that it is because there was too much activity with my template last night.

I took off each widget one by one and kept scanning the site to see if one of those was causing it.  The site continued to be marked.  I went on the hunt to see how to check my blog for malware.  There are three greats sites I learned about here that you can use to scan your blog.  They are Sucuri, Virus Total, and Comodo.  All three showed my blog is clean.

So now what's the next step?  I went to the McAfee site and set up an account.  I emailed them, started a ticket to get them to help me get my blog marked green again.  It is really annoying because followers who usually come might not click to come into my blog and new followers are probably scared off completely.  Hopefully I caught it fast enough. I don't know if this is a blogger issue or not.  Honestly I have no idea how long my blog as been marked as Malicious.

Today McAfee already closed my ticket.  My blog is in the green!!  Yeah!!  It really didn't take long for them to switch my blog from red to green in less then 24 hours. I still have some fixing to do on my blog from screwing around with the template but slowly it's all coming back together.

Be sure to check your blog... you never know if readers aren't able to get to your site!