It’s day six on the Google blacklist for Lucire. And no, we still don’t know what they are talking about. StopBadware doesn’t know what they are talking about. Our web guys and all our team in different parts of the world don’t know what they are talking about.
Today, I decided to venture to the Google forums. Google forums are generally not a good place to go to, based on my experience with Blogger, but I came across a really helpful guy called Joe (a.k.a. Redleg x3), a level 12 participant, who has gone some way to redeeming them.
I told Joe the same story. He begins writing, ‘First I think you really need an explanation from Google, I can see why your site was flagged originally but do not understand why Google did not clear it today.’
Exactly. But what was fascinating was that when he checked through a private version of aw-snap.info, which helps you see what malware spiders see, he found the old Google Adsense code the hackers injected.
This very code has been absent from our servers since Saturday, otherwise we would never have received the all-clear from StopBadware.org. We also don’t use a caching service any more (we used to use Cloudflare). But, if Google saw what Joe did, then it means Google’s own bot can’t load fresh files. It loads cached ones, which means it keeps red-flagging stuff that isn’t there.
If you read between the lines of what Joe wrote, then it’s clear that Google relies on out-of-date data for its malware bot. He checked the infected site and the file that caused all the problems has gone. And we know the hacks are gone from our system. It’s totally in line with what we were told by Anirban Banerjee of Stopthehacker.com on the errors that Google makes, too. I can only conclude that it’s acceptable for Google to publish libel about your site while relying on outdated information—information that it gathered for a few hours six days ago, which has no relevance today.
We still don’t know if things are sorted yet. We know this has been a devilishly frustrating experience, and damaging to our reputation and our finances. Yet we also know Google will just shrug its shoulders and do a Bart Simpson: ‘I didn’t do it.’ It’ll get blamed on the computer, which is terribly convenient. It’ll also blame covering up my Google Plus status criticizing them on the computer.
It looks like we are not alone. I’ve been reading of The New York Times and The Guardian getting red-flagged. Google even decided to blacklist YouTube at one point this year (given where I think the hackers’ code comes from, I am not surprised a Google property is malicious). The difference is that the big guys are more noticeable, so Google whitelists them more quickly. Our situation actually mirrored what happened at ZDNet, except they got cleared within hours (even though we fixed our problem within hours). The little guy, the honest business person, the legitimate blogger, the independent online store-owner—we’re in for a much harsher ride.
With Google supplying its corrupted data to other security programs like Eset as well as browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, then putting all your eggs in one basket is terribly dangerous, as we have seen. More so if that organization has no real oversight and your complaints are silenced. And as we have seen, Google will go to great lengths to preserve its advantages in the online advertising market.
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