When Google says “This site may harm your computer” about Your Website…

Posted: 20 Sep 2010 03:20 PM PDT

google search result label site as harmful

Yesterday was not a good day for many Malaysian webmaster and myself. Google has detected malicious software on our websites and redirect every visitors to a warning page with link to the diagnostic page.

What happened actually?

We are the victim of the failure of Innity, an online advertisement network. According to the official announcement, their server was affected (hacked?):

…In summary, a portion of our domain; innity.net, which operates as a content delivery network focused on delivering static banner files to our end user, was affected in Indonesia and this led to Google classifying our domain as being infected by malware.

Though the company took necessary actions to solve the problem but Google will take up to 48 hours to clear the warning…

The damages after listed as malware site

Believe me, it is one of the worst nightmare to your website.

Direct visitor to your websites will blocked by the scary malware warning and they will leave and might never come back again.
The Google will append “this site may harm your computer” in your site’s search engine results.
Twitter.com bans your site URL. Every tweet containing the website URL will not get published.
For a full-time blogger like me, it means drop in online income for the period!

What can we do after listed as malware site?

If you have signed up Google Webmaster Tools account, you will get notified when Google detect malware on your site and Google will send you an email.

In Google Webmaster Tools account, click on your site, then click “Malware” under “Diagnostics” to see the details of the harmful code found on the site.

There, you can click on “request a review” link to request a review of your site after you have removed all the harmful code.

The “Request a review” link might only appear couple hours later after your site listed as malware site.

Read about malware and hacked sites

What did I do to solve the problem?

I have removed all the innity’s advertisement codes immediately and requested a review on Google webmaster tools page.

Now, nothing I can do anymore except “WAIT”.

My two cents

Patient is very important when something bad happened unexpectedly.

Though Innity’s response promptly in this case but the damage is done. I believe the case hurt many of its publishers. No website owner want to get banned because of a single advertisement script.

Anyway, this is not the worst time in my blogging life. The worst nightmare was banned by Google because of selling text link ads. It took couple months to get back into Google search engine result pages.

The problem will be solved eventually and I shall continuously bring your the great content.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who notified me about the bad news. *hug*