"This site may harm your computer"

[walrus]

Apparently one of my main sites has been tagged with this great new feature. I cant find any hack code and am still diagnosing but it occurred to me they should add another new feature... This site may suck.

I'm sure some would say that about a couple of my sites but they surely don't suck as hard as the flotsam and jetsam i see in the serps every day above me for many phrases.

[nomis5]

Any idea why they have put this label on your site?

[walrus]

I figure its a movie or image i uploaded recently that must have been infected or server side include if i was hacked but still a mystery at this point.
Was quite a shock and i don't know how long it has been tagged. Not sure how this feature works but if its user voted i'm hoping they at least verify a traceable user, ie actual phone and address before they accept their testimony.

[walrus]

Still no reply from Google. This has got to be one of the most unfair things i have seen from the big G. No answer as to why,no identity from the complainer, the only way to reply is to ask for reinclusion but it is not reinclusion as site is still indexed.
Then it says we cannot reply to every request? This is a different situation than reinclusion.
Isn't there a responsibility to notify me as to what the complaint was about within a reasonable time? What if it is unfounded? How do you confirm what the user complains about?
This new feature is not ready to implement.

[Rosalind]

The first thing I would suggest is that you check your advertising providers. It's not unheard of that Google came across a malicious banner or flash-based advert, but when you checked it, it wasn't there.

Changing to text-based advertisements and respected providers may be one way to prevent this possibility.

It is quite possible that your site has been hacked without your knowledge, for example to insert malicious iframes. There was a javascript exploit reported recently that only delivers the malicious script once per IP. So you would visit once, and every subsequent visit you would appear to be clear whilst still being infected. Nasty.

If you are running common scripts, ensure they are the most up-to-date ones. Remove any scripts you aren't using.

Discover whether or not other websites on your server have been compromised, if you are on shared hosting.

[gohome]

I've gone through this in the past and it was a real pain, I lost 100% Google traffic.

The site was on a shared server which was hacked, all my index pages had been changed with malicious iframes.

As far as I remember Google did contact me by sending emails to various 'standard' email address's such as [e-mail] etc.

I had to work with stopbadware.org to have the warning cleared.

I think Matt Cutts has blogged about this feature.

[walrus]

I had removed a couple of old java games that were'nt working but I guess some of the flash and embed codes may not be up to date as well, i will check that too as well for an old affiliate ad that might still run on a neglected page or two.
I guess i should have gone straight to stopbadware.org to find out.
Thanks to all for the advice!

PS Have you seen Matts video webmaster tools yet? Not to be missed, him and his cat....its great!

[walrus]

Well this is a surprise, Real Player is flagged as well. Check out Stops homepage.

[walrus]

Even more surprising is that after searching my site in stopbadware there is nothing, which leaves no recourse since G only says to try re-inclusion with no guarantee of even a reply to ascertain what caused this.

[walrus]

DOH !

It wasnt about my site, i over reacted , misread the warning. If not for a flood of other aggravations and difficulties i may not have reacted in such a knee-jerk fashion, but i am on the edge of losing it as my demo CD title suggests.
Banging head against wall. I am a bonehead. BONEHEAD. Sorry about that Google, won't happen again. If it does at least it will be some new boneheaded complaint.

[ann]

If they would use it to catch the REAL bad guys that actually give you a virus or a trojan or two it just MIGHT be a good feature instead of using it to smear honest websites.

In fact, there are so many bad guys on Google I hate to have to do any research anymore, just stick with the sites I know are safe.

Ann

[walrus]

Same here. Not that Yahoo or MSN are any better of course. Glad to see in another thread they are working at ways to identify malicious sites.

[sandpetra]

I saw this on a site recently that had server problems and the server was "down" - when the server came back up online, and the website returned, I noticed Google had now slapped this notification in it on the serps.