About badware warnings

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Some of you have asked about the warnings we show searchers when they click on search results
leading to sites that distribute malicious software. As a site owner, you may be concerned about
the possibility of your site being flagged. We want to assure you that we take your concerns very
seriously, and that we are very careful to avoid flagging sites incorrectly. It’s our goal to
avoid sending people to sites that would compromise their computers. These exploits often result
in real people losing real money. Compromised bank accounts and stolen credit card numbers are
just the tip of this identity theft iceberg.

If your site has been flagged for badware, we let you know this in
Webmaster Tools. Often, we find
that webmasters aren’t aware that their sites have been compromised, and this warning in search
results is a surprise. Fixing a compromised site can be quite hard. Simply cleaning up the HTML
files is seldom sufficient. If a rootkit has been installed, for instance, nothing short of wiping
the machine and starting over may work. Even then, if the underlying security hole isn’t also
fixed, they may be compromised again within minutes.

We are looking at ways to provide additional information to webmasters whose sites have been
flagged, while balancing our need to keep malicious site owners from hiding from Google’s badware
protection. We aim to be responsive to any misidentified sites too. If your site has been flagged,
you’ll see information on the appeals process in Webmaster Tools. If you can’t find anything
malicious on your site and believe it was misidentified, go to
https://stopbadware.org/home/review
to request an evaluation. If you’d like to discuss this with us or have ideas for how we can
better communicate with you about it, please post in our
webmaster discussion forum.