This Site May Harm Your Computer

“This site may harm your computer”, this is what Google placed underneath all my listings towards the end of last week, why?… Well basically because a hacker managed to penetrate my server and place invisible code designed to place “trojan horses” onto my users’ computers.

If you’re unlucky enough to be tagged with ”This Site May Harm Your Computer” this is what your listing will look like:

If you actually click on the listing, Google will proceed to take you to a page that looks like this:

I spent the best part of the weekend cleaning up the mess the hacker left behind and trying to figure out a way to tell Google to remove the  ”This site may harm your computer” from my listings! I finally managed to do so on Sunday night when I discovered that the solution was right under my nose… Google’s webmaster tools!

If you don’t have a Google webmaster tools account I suggest you get one right away!  It is truly a fantastic interface that includes among other things, the quick soultion for the  ”This site may harm your computer” problem!.  Basically the interface tells you that your listings are marked with “This site may harm your computer” and gives you a sample of pages where the malicious code appears.  Its your job to go and clean that code and then submit a form telling Google that the code has been removed and request a review. 

Google will then review the site and if all is okay, it will remove the “This site may harm your computer” statement from your listings and all back to normal.  If the results of the review are negative, Google will let you know and will guide you further by giving you more sample urls were malicious coe (or malware/badware as they refer to it).  Once you’ve cleaned your whole site, Google will remove the “This site may harm your computer” from your listings.

Anyway, to cut a long story short,, sign up for a Google webmasters tool today.  I will blog separately about about this fantastic free service offered by Google so stay tuned…