Page 3 - "This Site May Harm your computer" Is big brother Google on a rampage?

Hi Bruce,

Welcome to SeoChat



I see a lot of complaints in this thread about the fact that Google are doing this and I just don't understand why!

If malware exists on a website, it's clearly the responsibility of the site owner / host to do something about it.

If the site owner isn't aware of it then it's unfortunate but what do you expect Google to do? It's hardly their job to notify you personally.

Malware became such a serious problem a few years ago, that web traffic as a whole was suffering badly.
Whilst McAfee, Spybot, Adaware, Norton and many others were furiously trying to find ways to combat it, Google simply added this service as another way of fighting the problem.

The fact that they don't remove the site from their results is probably because not all such downloads are malicious and I don't suppose they actually investigate them fully but I fail to see how they're doing anything wrong serving a warning notice to their users.

Bruce... Good luck fixing the problem. I can imagine your frustration but you really can't fault Google for it!
Personally I would be very disappointed with my host if this even happened without their noticing and I would demand their instant attention and assistance in putting it right.

Thanks, ClickyB. I got it resolved 4 weeks later, but I had a lot of traffic to my web site. Google putting this on their search results caused me a lot of stress, as it would any web site owner. It's the stress that pissed me off.

Using a shared web hosting service, any of their other clients could have uploaded some crap that spread through their servers and went into my folder.

What I noticed were folders in my FTP client that had recent modified dates on their timestamp, although I never made changes to them in months. That was the telltale sign I needed.

When I called my hosting company, they had nobody else complain about it. So, I concluded it was some jerk adding a virus to my account, one of my members logging in with spyware on their computer, or any number of things.

I got it removed and that's what counts. I appealed it to stopbadware.com

I can fully sympathise with you, everything to do with hosting problems seems to be mega-stressful
Those sorts of vulnerabilities and that level of service are one of the reasons why I dislike shared hosting so much... (of course they had nobody else complain if the malware was on your site)!

Glad to hear you're over it.

There must have been something which Google observed wierd.

It is highly likely that website was using some suspicious tracking codes/cookies which might have turned-off Google crawler.