As we struggle through being labeled by Google as a malware site, we are having a crash course in what to do when the Google Gods of search think you are dangerous. Now there is an even bigger problem, as we work on the web site, and write cool stuff, there are things that people need to do to get the Google Gods to bless you again.
Asking for a review via the Web Master Tools is just the beginning, the problem intensifies itself when you need to figure out that Google is going to take its own sweet team cleaning up the disaster in their index.
It does not matter how fast you clean it up…what matters is how fast Google can clear an erroneous flag in their database.
Struggling through the whole Google banning malware issue has been interesting. It took less than five hours for Google to work out and effectively kill the site in the Google search results. We figured it out in about another five hours and got the whole thing cleaned up in conjunction with the hosting company.
Now Google comes up with this friendly message in their web master tools.
Two weeks, for what took hours on our part to clean up, it will take a minimum of two weeks for Google to get the site killing malware link down.
Quick to damn, slow to fix, that is an issue for any one who runs a web site or blog, or anything else that gets dinged by the almighty gods of Google.
For someone who is extremely quick to fix things, Google should be as timely as well, since they essentially hold the keys to the kingdom for sending traffic your way, if the site is doing due diligence, then they should be as well. No one should have to wait two weeks with a false representation of their web site, blog, or otherwise.
Killer, wrong, and dead wrong. Come on Google, if you are going to kill off a web site, at least have the courtesy to respond at Internet speed. Taking two weeks to check to see if we are “ok” is absolutely unacceptable, especially when it takes less than 5 minutes to come visit the site and clear the flag.
Keywords: Google, malware, label, site, web master tools, messages, stopbadware.org, due diligence, Internet
I had the same thing happen to my site a few months back. It was a pain in the ass. It took Google 2 weeks to put our status back up to ok. This only happened because someone hacked our site. It is a pain.
We went through something similar when Google couldn’t read our robots.txt file for some strange reason and dropped our sites. We wound up having to switch hosts to resolve the issue.