Google and Firefox Are Blocking My Site Again. McAfee Says It's Safe.

Gary North - August 06, 2013

Google and Firefox are again blocking my site. They issue a warning.

McAfee gives it a clean bill of health.

The last time it did this a week ago, Google said it was because my articles have live links to sites that are infected. I have live links to thousands of sites. They serve as footnotes to show that what I say is verified elsewhere.

I do not put in live links to sites that are flagged as dangerous. So, why should my site be singled out?

Google backed off before. It removed the warning. But its spider/search program has imposed flagged it again. The program does not learn from past mistakes.

Our careers and our futures are now dependent on algorithms. This video shows why.

When the algorithm gets it wrong, we suffer.

I got this automated note from Google, after they had flagged my site. It came from noreply@google.com.

Dear site owner or webmaster of garynorth.com,

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com. Below are some example URLs on your site which can cause users to be infected (space inserted to prevent accidental clicking in case your mail client auto-links URLs):

http://www.garynorth .com/
http://mail.garynorth .com/
https://www.garynorth .com/

Here is a link to a sample warning page:

http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http%3A//www.garynorth.com/

We strongly encourage you to investigate this immediately to protect your visitors. Although some sites intentionally distribute malicious software, in many cases the webmaster is unaware because:

1) the site was compromised
2) the site doesn't monitor for malicious user-contributed content
3) the site displays content from an ad network that has a malicious advertiser

If your site was compromised, it's important to not only remove the malicious (and usually hidden) content from your pages, but to also identify and fix the vulnerability. We suggest contacting your hosting provider if you are unsure of how to proceed.

StopBadware also has a resource page for securing compromised sites:

http://www.stopbadware.org/home/security

Once you've secured your site, you can request that the warning be removed by visiting
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=45432

and requesting a review. If your site is no longer harmful to users, we will remove the warning.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

Note: if you have an account in Google's Webmaster Tools, you can verify the authenticity of this message by logging into https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview and going to the Message Center, where a warning will appear shortly.