"This site may harm your computer"

[kidder]

Google is proudly displaying this message for one of my sites in the organic search results - it's some type of spyware warning. I know nothing about this, as far as I know the site is clean and has been for the 6 years now that it has been online. The strange part about this is that Google is more than happy to take my money for adwords and send traffic to the same site without warning. It's disgusting.

[tedster]

We've had this issue come up several times - recently in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...] You may find that discussion quite informative.

I've had two clients who came to me malware warnings on their Google results. In both cases, the site owner had not done anything malicious, but yes - their server had been compromised without them knowing it.

The thing to do is to look at your source code - and follow Google's information on how to get the warning removed from the SERPs when you are sure it's fixed. The most common situation is called an "iframe injection" - so look for any code that shouldn't be there, with extra attention for iframes that you didn't put there.

This kind of parasite hosting is reaching epidemic proportions in recent times - and it's often used to form a wide base of drone computers. The iframes install trojans on the end user machines for various nefarious goals, such as DDOS attacks on major websites.

[edited by: tedster at 5:36 pm (utc) on Oct. 25, 2007]

[Reno]

This kind of parasite hosting is reaching epidemic proportions in recent times

Google could do the entire WWW a huge favor if they would put a new line for "Malware" in their Overview page of GWT, under the "Web crawl errors" section. If they ran across the kind of malicious coding that you are describing, they'd display the URL so the siteowner could find/remove it immediately. Would make GWT that much more valuable.

........................

[kidder]

Ok thanks for that advice Ted, the domain is 6 years old and script is dated. I think it's time I updated it to run wordpress however Google is reporting about 4000 pages, If I wipe the site and start fresh will the 404 error code be sufficient to stop us from getting dumped by Google? I've never done this before and I don't want to burn this particular domain. Organic search is nill now anyway so it's a good time to do it.

[tedster]

That's a whole other topic - and potentially not a small one. First try to find and clean-up the problem, I'd say.

Getting an entire new site indexed can be a bear of a job - although the 404's will be your friend. I'd say be sure to have a Webmaster Tools account set up first, for an authenticated communication line to Google. And since your organic traffic is minimal, it does sound like a good time to take some calculated steps.

[CainIV]

Likely what Ted said - iframe in the body load tag.

If there is a tag there, remove it, then apply for reinclusion at www.stopbadware.org and in Google webmaster tools.

[kidder]

Thanks so much guys, I've come to the decision that I can update this whole site into a blog and solve a lot of problems at the same time. So the only issue I will have is the large numer of 404's this will create. I will follow Ted's advice and work in with Google on this and hope it plays out.

[tedster]

Good resource for this topic written by a member of Google's anti-malware team:

Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

[ann]

Google is driving me crazy over this mess!

Midsummer I was using the preview tool and one of the ads did a redirect and started a download on me. I killed the ad, put it in the filter and quickly emailed Google about it. Some time later I was checking my site out because I had begun sliding in the serps and found that page had the dire warning on it.

Again I went to Google (email) and complained bitterly about what they had done to me because of a dodgy ad that they had left go live.

Anyway it was absent for awhile until this morning when I saw the same thing again. Went to tools, did a re-inclusion with a long email in the message part of it.

Checked around and about an hour later searched for it as a stand alone and low and behold it is clean!

I suspect it was all along and this last time was from an old cache. WHY don't they clean these things out/ Others may also see the 'old' serps and there I go again fending off emails that purport to tell me off for spreading that junk.

BAHHHH!

Ann

[ann]

Anyone else get it off their site listing?