Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
"This site may harm your computer" warning?
And do you remove links to those sites when you become aware of the warning?
I use FF and a "Reprted Attack Site" warning popped up the other day for a site I link to. I then checked Google and found the "...may harm..." warning in the serps.
I immediately deleted the link from my site and also called the site owner to alert him. So far, a few days later, the warnings are still in place.
But it makes me wonder, how much traffic does a site actually lose when it carries these warnings?
And how does a site get these warnings taken off after fixing the problem?
And do you remove links to those sites when you become aware of the warning?
We run a massive human edited link directory and we do not remove links to such sites. My experience is that either the warning is false, the site has been repaired so that there is no longer a problem or my computer is not detecting any problem that Google may have found.
I use IE with Symantec Anti-Virus and do heavy browsing, so about 1 or 2 times a week, I do get a virus or IE warning about a particular site or page, so it's not like I'm not able to detect problems.
I immediately deleted the link from my site and also called the site owner to alert him.
You are truly a good samaritan.
But it makes me wonder, how much traffic does a site actually lose when it carries these warnings?
My guess is that traffic is substantially lower. I believe that the warning has recently been changed so that there is no longer a link to click to bypass the warning and continue to the site. Most people will be freaked just to see the message and hit their back buttons as fast as possible, but this seems like a nail in the coffin for traffic. The only way to continue to the site is to copy the URL from the address bar and paste it back. How many users will do that?
And how does a site get these warnings taken off after fixing the problem?
I'd love to know the answer to this one, since I have seen many pages with warnings that don't appear to have any problem. I guess you have to wait for the page to be crawled again whenever that may be.
Google's detection rate for a site is nearly 100% accurate, but typically they flag the entire site (or occasionally only a subdomain), even if only a few pages are infected. So it is certainly possible to find clean pages in an infected site, but the malware flag is almost always accurate for the site as a whole. Flagging many pages instead of just the infected ones is intentional on Google's part, to prevent, as usual, gaming the system by experimenting to find out exactly what will get flagged and what won't.
Until about a year ago, if you had an outlink to a site that got flagged, you could get flagged, too, just for linking to it, and would have to remove the links. I've not seen that happen in a long time.
After fixing the problem, log into Google Webmaster Tools (create account and verify site ownership, if necessary), where there will be a link to request a review. You can also request a review at StopBadware.org, which partners with Google. If you never request a review anywhere, I would imagine the warning would eventually be removed, anyway, when Google discovers the site clean as part of its normal crawling, but requesting a review is faster.
[edited by: SteveWh at 8:49 pm (utc) on July 5, 2009]
Until about a year ago, if you had an outlink to a site that got flagged, you could get flagged, too, just for linking to it,
When I first spotted the warning message I ran an appropriate Google search to see if my site/page that linked to the flagged site had a warning message too. Nope my page was fine and still ranked #2 for the appropriate term.
You are truly a good samaritan.I dunno, I like the site and visit it fairly often and want to be able to do so again. But as of today the site is still flagged. :(
