Interesting that another word press blogger would suddenly wake up and find themselves in the “Google has banned me” listing, and frankly it is important to get these stories out. Not that anyone is going to blame Google, word press, or space aliens for the recent spate of hacking against many sites, the problem is with the outcome. The idea of being labeled malware, or being banned from the Google index altogether can be very lonely when you are wondering what you did, what is wrong, and why you were banned.

Often the answer is not immediately apparent, we got lucky because we got a “your site is a malware site” warning. Others not so, like Ryan Stewart.

But I think that’s kind of the problem. I had no warning, no heads up. I like to think I’m a pretty good Netizen – not some SEO firm trying to game the system. My Page Rank is (was) supposedly a 9 for goodness sake (which of course makes me more attractive to spammers). And yet I got totally removed. I use Google because it DOES keep search results free of spam. That’s great. But I realized last night that Google is holding all the cards. They can do whatever the heck they want to. So Microsoft, keep going after search. Get us better results, give webmasters more options. Startups, keep trying to find the weak link. Make Google make itself better. Improve the search experience across the board for everyone – users and webmasters. Source: Ryan Stewart

There are a lot of ramifications, that Ryan is going to see in the future, not just the ones that happened to us, loss of visitors, page rank, time, money, energy, effort. With Yahoo also starting to ban sites for malware, with Firefox three not allowing people to go to sites that have been hacked, there is both good and bad here.

The good part, and this is the very good part, and part of being part of a greater organism, is that people will no longer able to go to a hacked site, they will have to make it a conscious choice to go to a site that is hosting malware links or actual malware. We have needed this for a very long time, and needs to be done. Even though we were hacked, people were saved the problem of this site delivering malware links. This is all good.

The bad part is that there is a total lack of communication, often we stumble across the fact that we have been banned or labeled with few if any idea why. I got lucky, I am a security engineer and had a clue on how to look for and delete malware links. I knew of tools, technology, and processes that would allow me to clean up the site quickly. The even worst part is that the vast majority of people are not security engineers; they have no idea how to even start cleaning up their site.

While having the internet policed for malware and blocking those results in both Yahoo and Google now is a good thing. People need to learn to clean up after an attack, no your hosting company will not help you, it is your site. The local computer geek kid down the road might be able to, but you will have to pay. If there is a company out there that could fit this into a service model, spending days cleaning up someone’s site, then this might work out ok as a business model. As the search engines get into a bigger policing role, the need to have people who can really clean up the mess is something that in the longer run is going to be needed.