Is Your Site Getting Blocked by Filtering Software?

Fellow affiliate marketer Kim Rowley was spending a few days at the hospital tending to one of her twin daughters who has unfortunately landed there this week. Thankfully, it sounds like she’ll be ok.

Her tweets today also caught my eye for another reason…

I asked her what this meant and she sent me the following screenshot

This is a bummer. Basically it means that anybody browsing behind a corporate firewall, ISP, or desktop that is using McAfee’s Web Filtering service is blocked from seeing this website.

How did this happen?

We’ll likely never know, but Kim probably used some Advertising network that pushed an ad that McAfee took exception to at some point. Maybe there was a drive-by spyware installation that was happening through a promotion. She did tell me that she has had links from CPA networks on her sites.

What can she do about it?

My advice to Kim was to go to McAfee and run their Domain Health Check. You need to go through a short process to verify domain ownership and then you can get a PDF report delivered free for your domain. Along with that report is an email address where you can raise concerns with the results.

Here’s what she got back…

Lo and behold, there it is. Web Category: SPAM Urls.

What a fine category to be in. I think it’s pretty safe to say that she feels that the “web categorization of her domain does not reflect the nature of her business”.

Check your own sites

Short of taking a trip to the Children’s Hospital of Omaha to test our websites, you can go through the same process with your websites. It’s very quick and automated and you’ll have an answer back within minutes.

I did this for jangro.com  just to go through the process myself and it came back with no issues. You might want to give this a try on some of your sites, especially if you’ve been serving up ads from third party ad networks where you don’t control the advertising.