bikingshearer 

Come for the info, stay for the kudos. It's how we roll.

You've earned the kudos, Jon. No reason to be embarrassed.

bulgie 

I will drift off-topic, forgive me? A friend worked for a famous retailer of high-end luxury goods, can't say which one but you may have seen their TV commercials. Their website was down for hous one time, costing them something like a million $$ per hour in lost sales, and my friend was suspected of being the doofus who screwed it up. He was in networking — firewalls, routers and such. He was convinced the problem wasn't in his area so he dug into the website code (not his department) and found the whole thing was caused by a trailing space. A space character, that humans can barely see, and the software engineers overlooked, but computers are so infinitely stupid that the whole operation was brought down by one. (How that got through testing and into production, I don't know.) My friend not only cleared his name but got a nice bonus for fixing that. He recently retired (young) and now rides his bike every day.

Back on-topic? Well no, his bike isn't C&V. He thinks I am dumb for riding old bikes. He's probably right.

Mark B

merziac

Zero to hero, retired and done.

tricky 

This sounds painfully familiar!

schwim

Hi there Jon, sorry to steer it back on topic but I wanted to make a few observations that may ease your mind and help you in the future.

First, you haven't done anything wrong and until someone tells you that a particular software has an issue with your site, there's really no way for you to gain this info on your own, short of installing every single "safety" application out there. These applications are mainly useless shovelware packaged with new computers and sold primarily to an older demographic based on the fear of the WWW. They very often have flawed methods of coming to the conclusion that something is unsafe. Some of this software simply takes unmoderated reports from users and have been exploited by competing sites to blacklist a competing domain in an effort to claim some of their traffic. Your site coming up as malicious is just something that happens sometimes and your friend handled it properly. Notify the app maker and they will remove it from the blacklist.

One thing you may want to do is set up an account with the Google search console ( https://search.google.com/search-console). Through that panel, you can get help pinpointing site issues that can compromise your search results and visitor usability. It may seem daunting at first but it's the most important step for a smaller commerce site to ensure that you're not being kept from coming up as a search result due to site content issues. If you have any analytics for your hosting, you'll see that Google is probably your primary driver of traffic to your site. It's something that can make or break your sales online ( in this case, word of mouth likely comes close in traffic and surpasses Goog in relevant clicks).

All the best and I hope the information is of some help.

jonwvara 

Dammit! Those clueless old people are the beating heart of my business!

Anyway, many thanks for a bunch of useful information. It's good to know that sometimes things just happen. Next time, I just hope it won't take me four months to learn that something is up.

Looking on the bright side, at least, I wasn't losing millions of dollars an hour during my banishment.