Malware Warnings in Webmaster Tools - February 27th, 2007
Malware (also known as badware) is just a catch all phrase for viruses, adware or spyware. Google has recently added another tool to the already brilliant webmaster tools which lets webmasters know if they have any form of malware on their website, whether inadvertently or not. They have been working with StopBadware.org who are dedicated to irradiating all websites that either forces malware from the webpage, or allows users to download a program to do something, but as a side effect installs malware.
Sometimes malware on websites can be hard to spot. If your site has been hacked and is now installing malware on your user´s computers you might not even spot it. There may be that there is a 1-pixel iframe that point to a malware install script on another site.
Webmaster tools will also go one step further than just letting you know about it should you log into your tools. They will attempt to send an email to the webmaster of the domain, and will select likely aliases that might get a message through, such as webmaster or root, or similar.
This new section at webmaster tools is in addition to Google´s efforts to ban all domains that appear in the StopBadware.org´s malware list. So if your site has got a malware warning then your site is probably in immanent danger of being dropped. Google doesn´t actually use StopBadware in their webmaster tools, they just look at the site and try to intelligently guess if the site contains malware.
If your site has been blacklisted and you believe this is a mistake you can contact StopBadware through appeals at stopbadware.org.
Here at JustSearch our search engine optimisation programmers will look out for any issues regarding malware on your site, but as we include your site onto our webmaster tools account as a matter of course we are now more able to spot any of these errors.
Philip Norton
SEO Programmer
