Well if it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody. The website for my vacation rental was compromised. Here’s how it all went down. Yesterday I was talking to a renter and she said, I didn’t dare click on your website listing in Google because underneath the listing it said “This Site May Harm Your Computer”.
I immediately thought the renter had some sort of malware installed on their machine. I had never heard of Google policing the Internet, although I had heard that Google would put up a warning screen before visitors visited sites like warez, cracks, etc.. which are know to harbor malware. However, I decided to check it out and sure enough, here’s what I saw:
I was flabbergasted. This is my website for the vacation rentals I own…how could it be flagged as being harmful? Thankfully Google does offer some information on what may be causing the issue and why it was flagged. I downloaded Xenu Link Sleuth and checked all the site links, which was actually a pretty good exercise as I discovered some links that had expired from blog posts and a few mistakes in the site structure. One of the items that can trigger a warning like that on the Google serps is linking to sites that are know to harbor spyware / malware. I didn’t see any of those, just the regular run of the mill links to local activities, etc..
The next option was to explore was that my site was hacked. I forwarded the issue to my developer and what he found really startled me. Turns out that script, like WordPress, which powers my blog (and this blog) have known vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s so important to keep the blog script updated. Well I didn’t and some zealous little hacker exploited one of the security holes and uploaded some obfuscated code to my site. What it did or how it harmed people, I have no idea. My developer removed the code and I then filed a re-inclusion request through Google.
Turns out my site was flagged on March 20th, about the same time my inquiries from the site dried up. I was worried that Google , with all their red tape, would not review the site for weeks, leaving me high and dry. But to their credit, the re-inclusion request seemed to trigger a respider within 24 hours and this morning the flag was removed from the SERPs.
I am a little pissed that Google kept my adwords account going strong, even though they had no problem outing the site to the world. It’s great to protect the consumers, but I think Google, if they wish to be the police of the Internet, should invest more resources and try to contact the site owner rather than publicly flogging them. But like I said, it did force me to get it fixed fast and Google was fast in getting the flag removed.
So all of you vacation rental website owners, make sure to keep your scripts up to date, and watch your Google serps. If your inquiries one day just dry up, it could be because your site has been flagged by Google and contains some junk which could harm the computers of others!