Google Malware Warning: Big Help or Big Brother? - Is it Really Working?
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CIO News ran a story in early January that seemed to indicate these “false alarms” are a lot more common than Google and StopBadware would have you believe. “We have no bad software or installs or anything that would indicate a need to ban people from viewing our site,” wrote Matt Blatchley, who works for the Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education Service Center, in a posting to Google Groups. You can get to that web site now from Google without any warning, but it took a while to get rid of that warning. After you submit your site for review to StopBadware, an automated email says it will reply within 10 business days.
Blatchley explains that he received a response from StopBadware “after about 7 days of us waiting without a response other than an automated email, leaving us completely in the dark.” Was the blacklisting legitimate? “In the most recent response from StopBadWare they managed to find a few instances from 2005 when someone had used a JavaScript snippet to be added to some html files in one specific directory on a sub-domain and not the main website. It was a link that attempted to redirect the user to another machine, whose link no longer worked.”
The problem has since been fixed, but Blatchley’s real issue is in the way it was done: no notification from Google or StopBadware prior to the act. They were given “no opportunity to ask questions or make adjustments, they just blacklisted us without warning and without a link to the site from the interstitial page,” leaving them wondering why this had happened, Blatchley notes. “Very unprofessional!”
The Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education Service Center is not the only one who objects to Google’s high-handedness, especially to getting flagged without prior warning. CIO News quoted one user writing on behalf of Kukars Infotech, an IT services business in Rajasthan, India. “They [Google] are the king of the Internet. If they rank our website on top, then they can even humiliate us."
Other users think this is a sign of Google getting out of control. One SEO Chat forum member wondered if “big brother Google” was on a rampage: “[Is] Google at last donning a big brother role in a more conspicuous way? IMO Google is definitely going crazy.”
At this point, though, these people are in the minority. Posters to more than one forum have said that they’re glad Google is trying to make web surfing safer. Meanwhile, Phil Harton posted in the Google Webmaster Central blog that Google has added badware alerts to Google webmaster tools. “You can see on the Diagnostic Summary tab if your site has been determined to distribute badware and can access information to help you correct this,” Harton explains.
This is somewhat reassuring at least. Badware is a truly unpleasant surprise, whether you’re unwittingly receiving it or distributing it. Let’s hope that Google and StopBadware start responding a bit more quickly to review requests, though; getting tarred with this kind of brush can be very demanding on your time and resources.
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