This site may harm your computer
June 13th, 2007 by Joost SchrierOne of the most awful things that can happen to a company that engages in SEO is when Google says that that company’s website is harmful. Nobody will visit your website from Google while that warning is up, that’s for sure. This is exactly what happened to us this week:
Update june 15: yesterday evening the warning was removed. Google likes us again :).
The new stuff we try out, we always try out on our own website before we go anywhere near our clients’ websites. In this case we tried something out on our site which opened up a vulnerability. Somebody found it, took advantage of it and placed some malicious JavaScript on our homepage.
We figured out what happened, when it happened (last friday 10 a.m.) and how to fix it. So, we fixed it, checked our clients’ websites (just to be sure) and were pretty smug about it. Regretfully; over the weekend Google indexed our homepage and found the malicious JavaScript before we did. This triggered the “OMG, this site is evil”-button in Google on monday evening and we got blacklisted. When you look for our website in Google now you will see that Google thinks that “this site may harm your computer”.
What happens when Google sees evil JavaScript on your website? It adds this notification to the search result for all of your website’s pages and it throws your website in the database at StopBadWare.org. If your website is in this database at StopBadWare you need to file a “Request for Review” and somebody will subsequently review your website to see if it really fixed. According to some people this can take up to 10 business days!
On the one hand we don’t like the way this goes because Google or the people at StopBadWare could also send an email to the webmaster (who is known at Google through Webmaster Central) and give the webmaster some time to fix the problem. This is a pretty rigorous way of letting people know there is a problem. Luckily we found it ourselves and we found it fast, but not everybody is so obsessed with their website as we are.
On the other hand; badware, viruses, malware, etc. is a real problem and most people are not aware of the problems they cause. Google is in a position where it can use its power to help make the web a safer place by stomping on websites that host badware. Partnering with StopBadWare is a good move because it adds credibility to the effort.
Anyway, you live and learn. We have learned to be more careful with our baby and will take Google’s judgment as a fair call. We have been beafing up security over the last few days and will keep an extra weary eye on what’s going on on our websites and our clients’ websites.
September 6th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I got the dreaded “This site may harm your computer” notice attched to my website. I was disappointed with google, I felt that they should have e-mailed me before blacklisting me, or even after they blacklisted me, I had to find out for myself when the stats showing the number of visitors from google went down to zero. I have now turned off my adwords campaign. I also feel that the delay in removing the notice is unacceptable. Google is showing a mix of arrogance and incompetance. Goes to show monopolies are not such a good idea in cyberspace, long live altavista, msn, yahoo and other search engines.