Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In mid June, my traffic suddenly dropped about 60% and my adsense earnings dropped at least the same amount. Now there are 1001 reasons why the traffic to a website might drop, and many of them are the subject of various conversations here. For a couple weeks I scratched my head trying to think of why the traffic dropped and what I could do to fix it.
Finally I stumbled upon it - Google had designated my site as a source of malware and put a warning up for everyone who came to the site through G. This virtually eliminated all my Google traffic. I operate a sqeaky clean site and certainly dont knowingly infect my visitors with malware. I checked the code of the page in question - my homepage. The code of my home page is exceedingly simple and there was no sign that the page had been hacked - all the code was just as I posted it and just as it should have been. I have not changed my homepage html code in months.
I noted from my Google webmaster central info that the googlebot had seen the malware on only one visit, and subsequent visits were clean. However, the warning notice and block to all google visitors lasts for 90 days after the last time they find a "problem" on your site - even if susequent visits are clean. After investigating, I came to the following two possibilities as the cause:
1) The internet host that serves up my site had some of their servers hacked and the malware code had been inserted for a time but later found out by the host and the code of my page restored to its original state from a backup;
2) The link to malware appeared on the page served up by adsense. Google specificly notes that you can get designated as a suspicious or dangerous site through links served up by third party advertising sources. While I am sure G makes a reasonable efort to ban adwords sites that serve up malware, they dont find them instantaneously, so an adwords site may exist and serve up malware for a short time while G finds and removes it.
Either of these could have caused my site to be designated as a suspicious malware source, and in either case the problem was not due to me or anything I did.
Once I figured it out, I contacted G for a re-review in light of the fact that there was no malware currently on the site. about 24 hours later, the warning was removed and just as suddenly as it disappeared, my traffic was back to normal and my adsense income with it.
Probably the more experienced folks here know all about this, but I had not seen any previous post on it, and perhaps the less experienced folks will learn as I did one thing to check for when one has a sudden traffic drop.
"If presumably, you are talking about Adwords advertisers appearing in your Adsense ads, how can they serve malware on your site?"
When Google looks at your site to determine if its a "bad" site, they look at all the exterior bound links on your page, including those severved up to your page by third party advertising systems like adsense. If a page you link to is a malware serving page, then you get marked as a suspicious site as well. While Google keeps an eye on its adwords sites and bans ones that are serving up malware, the process of finding them and weeding them out is not instantaneous. If a webmaster puts virus injection code onto his previously approved adwords site, it might take days or even longer for Google to find out that a site is serving up malware and eliminate it. In the mean time, that contaminated site may be serving up malware content to your visitors if they click on an adsense link on your page.
Of the two possibilities, I think the hacking of my host server is probably the more likely of the two, but both are very possible causes for the problem I had.
However, are you saying Google is pharsing javascripts (such as the Adsense code)?
What he said might clear this up.
The exact page you are referred to that describes the general reasons why they tag sites as "badware" is found at:
[stopbadware.org...]
(its a site worth looking at for most webmasters)
Reason number 3 as to why you could be marked bad is as follows:
3. Badware distributed through ads running on your siteAdvertising displayed on your site is another potential source of badware, since most ads include direct links to an external web page. Please see section 1.2 above for general information about our guidelines for badware found via links. If you display third-party ads on your website, check that the links do not lead to bad software or to a badware-infected web page. The methods for evaluating the software that is available through ads are similar to those described in section 1.1.
I think its plain to see that if you display third-party ads on your website that lead to bad software or to a badware-infected web pages, you can be tagged by Google as a "badware" site yourself.
Using some fly-by-night banner rotation service to rotate affiliate ads, or some sleazy little traffic tracker, anything like that could end up costing you if they turn to the dark side or get hacked.
Stick with major brands for these kinds of services and you're less likely to get into trouble with malware distribution.
But even the tedster post doesn't claim that Google is parsing js.
As much as I respect Tedster I have to disagree because Google couldn't detect the iframe injector scripts or any of the other viruses which they do detect to disable infected sites without parsing javascript at some level. The code of those scripts is unique per hacker so you have a basic idea what to look for but one malware fingerprint doesn't fit all sites, you actually have to interpret some of the script.
I run a directory and coded my link scanner to check for quite a bit of malware so I can quarantine bad sites until they get it fixed, and I'm just a one man shop.
If I can do it, you know Google has to be WAY more advanced than I am.
That's my $0.02 worth, factor inflation.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 9:05 am (utc) on Aug. 5, 2008]
Technically you could set up a site, sign up for adwords and get approved. Request to have your ads on the competors site, then add virus injection to your landing page. Google would shortly remove your site from adwords, but if Google saw you ad on the copetitor's site before you got kicked out of adwords, then you might temporarily get the competitors site labeled as a "badware" site.
You could accomplish the same thing and probably have more time to contaminate his site if you bought fixed adspace on his site.
As incrediBILL noted, you have to be really careful what ads you put on your site. In my case, the only ad I have on the page Google labeled as bad is a single adsense link unit.
