I was doing my daily routine today and trying to find some relevant link partners for one of my clients, when I ran into something I have never run into before, a “Google Content Advisory Warning”. It seems like Google is now able and is analyzing the contents of particular pages and websites for content that may be harmful to your computer. The site that I was trying to access was presented to me via a simple query on Google. When I clicked on the link listed I got the following message:
If you want to try this first hand and see it for yourself, please click on the following Google search query. You will be presented with some search results. Clicking on one of the search results will activate the Google Content Advisory. DO NOT proceed past the Google Content Advisory.
Although I am grateful that the Google’s content advisory intercepted my attempt to access the site, one begs to ask the question; If Google has it in their means to identify such harmful sites, why are they not simply removed from the search results and their index?
Interesting. Never seen that before.
Yeah, its also a first time for me.
Just checked it up against it here and nothing “evil” there to be said about the mentioned site
Amazing really, i am scratching my head at that. But i don’t understand why has google indexed that page if it can detect it as harmful. And I do not find Mcafee site advisor commenting anything about that site.
If Google filtered their search for sites like that, then they would be accused of blocking sites that are not harmful, and just opinionated.
This has been around for quite a while. Just go to the stopbadware.org site and you will find answers to the questions you pose.
I think it only appears when there is a particular term that is on the watchlist on google.
Fascinating. Wonder if the folks at said site are even aware of this?
When you click on the stopbadware.org link you get the following notes:
“You landed on this page because Google’s independent testing has found that some portion of the site you were attempting to reach contains or links to badware or otherwise violates software guidelines of both Google and StopBadware.org. See the StopBadware.org FAQ for more information on Google warning pages.”
This basically tells me that Google is probably, well not probably, IS scanning for badware when they index your site - just like Nortons or McAfee on your PC - but in a much larger scale.
I also suspect that if individuals are unknowingly uploading infected files to their hosting space they are going to be a little surprised.
Here are few tips:
If you use your hosting space as an legitimate and alternative storage device to your own PC, create a directory/folder on your host where you will upload your PC files.
Then ensure you place that folder in robots.txt as nofollow.
Also ensure that the upload folder is not viewable to other individuals, so do not link to the folder or any files in the folder and most importantly, password protect access to that folder.
Yes, I saw this, it pops up when you try to open some web sites witch contain cracks, serials or something like this.