How to check donor sites for filters and malware

Donors that are sanctioned by search engines decrease acceptor's ranking and may cause it's getting filtered. Generally, the sanctions mean total site's exception from the SERP, lowering ranking or partial exception of some pages.

Any sanction leaves its trace on the site's history and reputation. In the case of banning, significant work must be done to deal with it and get the site unblocked. Promoting the sanctioned site is quite complicated as Google applies a Penguin filter for using wrong links.

A virus is malicious code, that means a result of hacking. The virus can harm the site itself as well as the whole hosting. The latter will cause spreading the malware among all the hosted websites. While entering the infected site, a user gets a notification that this is unsafe.

As our purpose is not to study the site but check the donors, we can't use Google Search Console. So, let's consider some other online checking services.

You may use some link markets' stats that estimate the site's trustworthiness and rank its possibility of being sanctioned.

An analyzer that can help to see the risk of becoming filtered is Websites Penalty Indicator. The tool is free and available without registration. It helps to trace how Google algorithms' updates influence the site.

If you see that the organic site traffic is significantly affected, the probability of the site's being sanctioned grows. Here are some examples of the traffic on a sanctioned site:

The opposite situation:

Note that the sanctions may be applied not for the whole site but for some of the pages. In this case, the analysis becomes much harder.

To check your site for malware, you can use Web inspector tool. This is a free website malware scanner.

While entering the infected site, your antivirus signalizes about the threat. Either, Google also will notify you about the risks.

Moreover, you can use virustotal to check the site for malware. Choose the URL tab and enter the site address to start analyzing.

What is the worst of being infected is that you are likely to be added to a ban-list. So, if a donor site is infected, it doesn't have to refer to your site. And your web-resource mustn't contain any of them.