HOW TO UNBLOCK WEBSITE ON FACEBOOK

I finally managed to get the website businesslegions.com unblocked on Facebook and I wanted to share how I did this so you don’t have to go through the same pain that I did. I initially discovered the website was blocked from being shared on the Facebook Page – Business Legions on the 19th of November 2019. The error message “Your content couldn’t be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards. If you think this doesn’t go against our Community Standards let us know.”

All of my previous posts on the Facebook Page which had a link to that URL suddenly disappeared as well. Also, when I tried submitting a Facebook App for approval this was the error message I was receiving “This URL has been identified as malicious and/or abusive”:

I have managed the Facebook Page for a number of years and all the posts I shared on Facebook are related to technology or business, I’m not sure why it was being blocked by Facebook. In any case, I decided to reach out to the Facebook App Review Support Chat (I thought it would be quicker to chat to someone and get it resolved). This was my initial contact:

After a number of messages and chatting to an actual support staff they advised to change the URL to https (secure). I honestly didn’t think that was the cause but I did it anyway and it didn’t fix the issue. The support person then told me that it could be a bug and to submit a bug report by going to this website address, https://developers.facebook.com/support/bugs/

I submitted the bug and followed this up a few weeks later since it wasn’t resolved. I received no confirmation of the bug being reported or had any ticket ID. I was pretty confident it wasn’t a bug and that Facebook’s algorithm accidentally blocked the website. The Facebook support staff also asked me to check the status of the bug by going to https://developers.facebook.com/notifs/ but the reported bug wasn’t even listed there.

After a few weeks of further waiting, I reached out again and was told to post the question on the Facebook Developer Community Forum.

I was pretty sure that Facebook needed to manually review the URL and unblock it so I wasn’t sure how the community group would help but I went ahead and submitted an appeal.

After a few months of submitting unblock requests via the methods above and following up the issue on the chat, the website was still blocked and I couldn’t submit the app for review or posts any links with the URL. Some of the community forums suggested to enter the website in the Debugger https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ (not sure how this would fix the issue) and indeed the debugger also reported that it couldn’t scan the website.

I sort of gave up in late February 2020 and decided to just focus on writing and sharing content on this website. It wasn’t until this week, after receiving many thank you messages and donations from the article HOW TO FIX FACEBOOK TOO MANY REDIRECTS that gave me some motivation and inspiration to find a way to unblock the website. I also had an idea to maybe outreach and contact someone from Facebook (upper management) directly.

THE PROCESS TO UNBLOCK WEBSITE

NOTE: I’m sharing what worked for me in the hope that it may also work for you. I can’t guarantee that these same steps below may work for you but it’s worth a try. It’s important to note that someone from the Facebook team needs to review and manually unblock the website.

I had the idea that maybe using Facebook ads might be a way to get some attention and potentially to get a Facebook support staff member to look into this further especially if I was planning to spend some money on Facebook Ads and that’s where I found my answer. Now, before going through the below steps make sure you have a Facebook Ads account (you will need to add your Ad Account ID in one of the steps below). Check by going to business.facebook.com

Here are the steps I used to Unblock my website:

Go to the Facebook Business Help Center: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/ and click on Getting Started button at the bottom. Make sure you are logged into your Facebook account otherwise you will not see some of the steps below.

Then click on Business Pages:

Click on Chat with a representative:

You now need to complete the form (in my case there was no one available to chat since I contacted them out of business hours so I just went ahead and completed the form and it sent the Facebook support an email).

Depending on whether the Facebook support staff are available for a chat, you will be displayed with two different forms. Here’s the form you will need to complete if chat is available:

This is the form I actually completed and submitted to Facebook support:

Make sure you enter your Ad Account ID and select the Facebook Page you’re managing and using to share your Facebook posts. Select Pages and Other for What is your question about. Select No for Are you an IARD Alcohol Client. In the subject title I entered Website Address Blocked and in the description I entered:

Hi there,
My website Business Legions (https://www.businesslegions.com) has been blocked due to community standards however when I check the page quality says that “Your page has no restrictions or violations”.
Can you please advise why it is blocked and how I can resolve the issue.
Thanks and look forward to resolving this long standing issue.

Take a screenshot of the page quality. I was able to attach this to the form but if you are actually chatting to someone you can share this screenshot with them. The page quality of the page can be found here when you manage your Facebook Page:

The Page quality returned “Your page has no restrictions of violations” which gives you a strong indication that your website URL shouldn’t be blocked at all.

I sent the form and surprisingly, the next day I actually received a response back from the Facebook Concierge Support. It was the first time that I actually received any responses back so I knew I was heading in the right direction to have this issue resolved. They asked me a few questions, ie what the URL was that is blocked and then a few days later I received this email saying it has been unblocked:

I am writing about your concern on your blocked URL. I am pleased to inform you that we have already unblocked your site. We use a variety of systems to help detect and block abuse in Facebook including both human review and automation. The website was blocked as a false positive from our automation. We have lifted the block. I hope that you find this information useful and I’m glad that we were able to resolve this case for you! I would like to thank you for your patience as we worked on your concern.

Thank you Facebook Concierge Support Team! You did great in resolving my issue. If I knew these were the steps to take in order to unblock the website it would have saved a lot of time and headaches. Now if you run into the same problem then give the above steps a try and make sure to share this with the Facebook community and other readers if it also worked for you. As a final note, never give up!

If this article helped you in any way and you want to show your appreciation, I am more than happy to receive donations through PayPal. This will help me maintain and improve this website so I can help more people out there. Thank you for your help.