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This Contractor’s Website URL Was Wrongly Labeled Spam By MacAfee, Costing Him Thousands In Lost Revenue. Here’s How We Fixed It.

It’s scary to think about, but some prospects trying to visit your website may be greeted with a message similar to this:

MacAfee’s “malicious content” warning page (a.k.a. the Kiss of Death for a contractor’s website lead conversions).

MacAfee’s “malicious content” warning page (a.k.a. the Kiss of Death for a contractor’s website lead conversions).

That’s is what Ed Chmar, owner of Homelife Remodeling and MYM client, discovered a few weeks ago. A prospect trying to visit Homelife Remodeling’s website ran into the message above. The prospect contacted Ed to let him know about it.

Ed was confused. The new website we built him was protected by SiteLock, which scans his site daily for viruses and malware. It’s the Fort Knox of internet protection. The likelihood of a Monopolize Your Marketplace-built website being hacked is 0.00%. It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen.

Ed called GoDaddy, which hosted his website, to find out what the heck was going on. After keeping Ed on the line for an hour (naturally), GoDaddy told him his website was hacked. They passed the buck (naturally) and told Ed he had to call the company that built his website. That was us.

When Ed called us, he was understandably mad. What in the world happened? How could we let his website get hacked?

Turns out, we didn’t.

We researched the problem and discovered Ed’s old, pre-MYM website had been hacked before he hopped on the MYM train. Antivirus-protection company MacAfee found out about this and flagged Homelife Remodeling’s URL as “malicious” to anyone running MacAfee on their computer.

Not good. At all.

MacAfee is one of the world’s most popular antivirus-protection programs and partners with Intel, the U.S.’s largest computer-chip manufacturer (if you’ve ever wondered why new computers ALWAYS come with free trials of MacAfee, there you go). Millions of people use MacAfee—and every single one of those people trying to visit Homelife Remodeling’s website was met with a spam-warning page. Imagine the amount of prospects, leads, and revenue Homelife Remodeling was LOSING. It’s a good reason to add a few quarters to the Swear Jar.

Here’s where it gets worse. Did MacAfee let Ed know when and why they blackballed the contractor’s website? Nope. Once MacAfee flags your site as malicious, they do not inform you nor do they ever return to see if it’s fixed. You have to go to them to have your name removed from their naughty list. If it hadn’t been for the upstanding citizen who called Ed about the problem, no one would have known about it. That’s why when Monopolize Your Marketplace built Homelife’s new website, their URL was still blacklisted for MacAfee users.

Since the blacklisting occurred before Homelife Remodeling joined MYM, this was not our problem. And if we were the typical internet marketing company, we would have told Ed, “Sorry, can’t help you. Godspeed, though!”

But we’re not the typical contractor internet marketing company. So we took matters into our own hands.

Your Business = Our Business

We told Ed to stay calm—we’d take care of his problem for him. Monopolize Your Marketplace COO Bryan Bauman immediately created an account with Intel/MacAfee and resubmitted Homelife’s URL for scanning. Forty-five minutes later, Homelife was removed from MacAfee’s blacklist.

Homelife’s problem was taken care of. Prospects using MacAfee could now visit Homelife’s website without running into a warning page. Ed was happy.

But we weren’t done with MacAfee—not yet.

We had to make sure there weren’t any other old, out-of-date spam flags on our clients’ URLs. Our team dropped everything they were doing and requested that MacAfee rescan ALL of our clients’ new, MYM-built home improvement websites.

And it’s a good thing we did. While only one other client was blacklisted as “malicious,” Intel/MacAfee had nearly all of our clients’ websites mis-categorized as “Marketing/Merchandising,” rather than as “Business.”

That’s like the Yellow Pages listing a home improvement contractor in the “Advertising Agency” section. It can harm SEO for contractors and make it harder for prospects to find you via search engines. So we took the time to manually change every wrongly-listed website and put it in the correct category.

Was this our responsibility? Technically, no. The average internet marketing company doesn’t take on blacklisting and site mis-categorization problems for their clients. But like we said, we’re not the average internet marketing company. We were more than happy to help. In fact, it we felt it was our duty to our clients.

We’ve Got Your Back

When you partner with Monopolize Your Marketplace, our “above and beyond” customer service provides you total peace of mind. We’re determined to help your business succeed, so we go to extraordinary lengths that other marketing companies don’t, won’t, or can’t. Your marketing and website affairs are our marketing and website affairs—and we’ll do everything in our power to help you with whatever you need.

To provide such a high level of service, we restrict ourselves to a 100-client maximum. (Not 101. Not 102. One-hundred… period.) Right now, we have a few openings on our client list, but these openings always fill up fast. If you’d like more information about becoming an MYM client, pick up the phone and call (817) 416-4333 or email at info@mymonline.com for more information TODAY. We would be honored to talk to you.