Simple fact – you do sometimes block websites without justification. Everyone makes mistakes and you and your systems are just as capable of making errors as we all are. Time to stop being so Godlike, yes?

You blocked my website last Friday and your own systems have not worked as they should have done on this occasion.

The diagnostic page offered no information whatsoever – it implied there was no evidence of malware! The webmaster tools added no further information, and incidentally – the only content within my website which is externally controlled is from Google!

Four sets of independent checks were carried out and no malware was discovered; neither was there any identifiable evidence of a security vulnerability.

The assessment page Google published on the Saturday (less than 24 hours after the warning went up) even confirmed that the site was clean and the warnings were being removed. They were still in place on Monday so I requested another review with a comment stating that the warnings were supposed to have been removed a few days ago. My comments were ignored but a second review was undertaken, once again showing there was nothing wrong with my site. The warnings are still in place today (Wednesday).

DIAGNOSTIC PAGE
What is the current listing status for http://www.removed.ie?
Site is listed as suspicious – visiting this web site may harm your computer.

What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 139 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 09/29/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, http://www.removed.ie/ did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.

Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

How did this happen?
In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message.

FROM WEBMASTER TOOLS
Status of the latest badware review for this site: A review for this site has finished. The site was found clean. The badware warnings from web search are being removed. Please note that it can take some time for this change to propagate.*

* How long is “some time”. I am timing this from the first “all clear” given on Saturday 27th September.

You are quite right that website owners should be more thorough in their checks, but you are ignorant of how your actions can affect innocent people and you should show them a little more respect than you do. Your process is harsh and flawed. Google should remove suspicious entries from its index allowing full and thorough investigations behind closed doors.

As it is, you have already lost me at least two clients and you have provided no evidence whatsoever to show your warnings were even justified.

Have a nice day.

Just saw this and thought it was interesting/funny. I used the Safe Browsing Diagnostic page on google.com itself and got back info that you guys had a trojan on your system and that it infected 1 other site.

Glad to see it didn’t effect other sites and resulted in no new processes on the target machine!

You can view the details at: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://google.com

Thanks for letting us know about the useful tool Matt.
– Sean

Thank goodness I finally found your blog.

This topic ” Generic Malware Debunking Post” seems to be just what I’ve been looking for in terms of trying to comprehend what’s going on with my site.

After viewing some of your teaching videos on Youtube and seeking help regarding my issue from the Google Webmasters Forum with no successful results, I decided that you were definitely “THE ONE” who possessed the knowledge to best assist me.

It appears as if my Blog has been Penalized because Google apparently thinks its Spam..

or….

URLs from my site (more than 300) are being blocked for some other reason.

None of them are Duplicates, Spam, Porn, Paid links or 404s, so why are they being restricted?

My Traffic Ranking also keeps going UP and then dropping really LOW for no logical reason.

This is happening despite the fact that my Traffic is pretty Good.

Ex: From like 51,000 to 27,000 in one week.

After submitting a sitemap, I was being indexed then suddenly that appeared to stop as well.

When I checked my Diagnostics and Robots.txt file I found this statement:

“Allowed
Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions”

I initially thought that someone was perhaps sabotaging my site from another server, etc., however now after reading your post entitled, ” Generic Malware Debunking Post”, it looks as if Google thinks my Blog is a Spammer which most definitely isn’t true!

I sought re-consideration for Indexing and was assured that I’m am but I don’t see any new posts showing up in Google.

My Blog is currently being hosted on Blogger and while I do plan to change platforms, I’d like to fix the errors first or at least find out what’s wrong.

In a nutshell HELP!

Please

Thanks

RB

http://votemecool.blogspot.com

Your account above does omit some things. For example, many of the links flagged as pages containing malware were not Web pages at all, but rather PDFs — just documents. And they were perfectly clean. What’s more, only SOME of the documents on the site were flagged as malware — ones that came out at the top of Google’s search results for items related to “network neutrality” on the site. So, at best, the PDF files that were flagged as having malware were false alarms due to overzealousness. At worst, there may actually have been some “activist” inside Google flagging them, though I hope not.

When you say you are head of webspam, it sounds like you are in charge of creating spam rather than fighting it.

I normally say “Head of the webspam team at Google” unless people don’t know what webspam is. But I usually only work on webspam.

http://www.pcbugsquad.com/2008/07/googles-grandcentral-blog-has-been-hacked/

It appears Grandcentrals blog was hacked and now Google, themselves, are pushing spam links for buying drugs and online pharmacies.

I just checked it out and these spam links are still in the html? You woul dhave thought the algos would have caught this one on your own site ?

For the record

Sometimes your title is mentioned as:

The head of WebSpam at Google.

And sometimes:

The head of Spam Detection at Google.

Are above two different teams? Are you the head of two teams now? Got promoted without telling us or something

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://metrotimes.com”

Thanks a lot for sharing the information.