Google Incorrectly Flags Websites as Dangerous

Although I wrote about this a few days ago, the reports keep coming so I need to say it once again: Google incorrectly flags several websites as dangerous although they have nothing to do with viruses or other types of infections. I'm sure you saw at least one security notification on the Google SERP which simply says that "This site may harm your computer". Clicking on the result redirects you to another security notification which informs you that "Visiting the website might harm your computer", requiring you to copy and paste the link of the original page in order to load it. Well, you might think that the website is really infected and you might get your computer infected.

Actually, it's clean and surprisingly, Google is wrong! Yes, you've heard it well, Google is wrong! It seems like the problems started from the advert providers which didn't manage to block a threat from being distributed to the visitors of the registered pages.

"We've been completely left in the dark, and we're in a situation where people think we have done something wrong. So Google's policy here seems to be to punish an innocent site but not provide information to allow an advertising network to find out what the advert is that is causing the problem and stop it delivering elsewhere in the network," Alan Jay, director of Digital Spy and one of the affected website owners, said for The Register.

There's not much to do in order to avoid the security notification displayed on the Google search engine result page. All you can try is to request a review that might allow the StopBadware folks to understand that your website is actually clean and no threat is delivered through its content.

"Clearly, the Internet is very large and we cannot constantly monitor all sites. We select a daily subset of the Internet to investigate. Malicious content delivered by ad networks is a relatively new threat, and we are looking at different approaches to help site owners with this issue while protecting our users," a Google representative sustained according to The Register.