Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

Monday, August 13, 2007

In the past year, the number of sites affected by
malware/badware grew from a
handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for site
owners of affected sites—suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post
“About badware warnings” as well as the
stopbadware discussion group.
Now, Webmaster Tools
provides malware reviews.

If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through
malware-labeled search results
or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we’ve streamlined the process to review your
site and return it without a malware label in our search results:

1. View a sample of the dangerous URLs on your site in Webmaster Tools.
2. Make any necessary changes to your site according to
   StopBadware.org’s Security tips.
3. New: Request a malware review from Google and we’ll evaluate your site.
4. New: Check the status of your review.
   • If we feel the site is still harmful, we’ll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous
     URLs
   • If we’ve determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the
     near future (usually within 24 hours).

We encourage all site owners to become familiar with
Stopbadware’s malware prevention tips.
If you have additional questions, please review our
documentation or post to the
discussion group.
We hope you find this new feature in
Webmaster Tools
useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems, and thanks for your diligence for
awareness and prevention of malware.

Written by Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Anti-Malware Team