Firefox / Internet Equivilant of Guantanimo bay

deevey

Has anyone here by chance had any experience of the firefox / google malware prevention causing a perfectly good site showing as a reported attack site ?

Our companies website has been showing like this the past few weeks, if the "why was this site blocked" button is clicked it shows there has been no malware detected for the past 90 days !!! .. have run the site through various checkers.. even stopbadware report is clean.

Its causing loadsa our customers to obviously not enter the site .. has been reported to google who say it will be "several weeks" until the site is reviewed/re-indexed :-O in the meantime we lose a hell of a lot of business...Site views are down majorly.

Our site is relegated to the Internet Equivilant of Guantanamo bay .....Guilty until proven innocent.

tricky D

posting your site address would be helpful

deevey

I'd prefer not to post the site link, sent you on a PM with the link though .. I just work for the company, not own it ..

Just wondering if anyone has had similar issues.. and how you got round them...

Attched image

Trojan

PM on the link to me.

Take a look at http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://YOUR-SITE-URL.ie/

tricky D

Hmmm, that's not right. It reports no current problem, so the site shouldn't be blocked. Google should really get their finger out quicker in these instances. Leaving it a few weeks is not good enough while it damages the reputation of the business. I can only suggest you hound them. Also you might see what a solicitor might say about this.

zAbbo

I reckon the problem is local rather than global.

Does it happen on different computers from different ISP's?

It's possible you've just enabled some security setting which blocks a website which has active-x etc.

deevey

Default installation of Firefox3 on XP / Mac OS / Vista regardless of ISP or computer ... zAbbo, sent you across the link too if you wanna looky

yes you can turn this feature off, but its on by default, and seriously, how many punters would even know how to turn the feature off .. why would they?

More and more client sites I visit have firefox installed by the IT staff and exploder removed to prevent "issues".

Trojan .. thats excatly the page that gets displayed if you click the "why was this site blocked" :-S

Oh and the request for review is automated, there basically isn't anyone to hound

"We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.xxxxxxxxx.ie/
We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to each request."

Trojan

deevey wrote: »

Trojan .. thats excatly the page that gets displayed if you click the "why was this site blocked" :-S

Sorry - didn't know that - can't tell unless you tell us what the site is

blue4ever

deevey wrote: »

Has anyone here by chance had any experience of the firefox / google malware prevention causing a perfectly good site showing as a reported attack site ?

Our companies website has been showing like this the past few weeks, if the "why was this site blocked" button is clicked it shows there has been no malware detected for the past 90 days !!! .. have run the site through various checkers.. even stopbadware report is clean.

Its causing loadsa our customers to obviously not enter the site .. has been reported to google who say it will be "several weeks" until the site is reviewed/re-indexed :-O in the meantime we lose a hell of a lot of business...Site views are down majorly.

Our site is relegated to the Internet Equivilant of Guantanamo bay .....Guilty until proven innocent.

Did anything happen the hosting server/provider.

I know that you have probably been through this but did anything of any consequence happen around the same time. Try resubmitting your sitemap to Google see what that throws up – is there anything in your google webmaster tools that might give you some indication as to what might bee cheesing them off?

C

Guantanamo - i believe its referred to in the US military as "GitMo" now - just to introduce a small bit of levity!

blue4ever

I sent a pm

deevey

Just as an update, so far it looks like nothing has been done...

In desperation I called adwords support (as we do pay for advertising) and got onto a nice guy who sent me a mail asking for all the details/screenshots etc ..

Few days ago I got another mail back from him to say the details have been forwarded to the correct dept, blagh blagh .. but still the same issues. And of course NO support number or mail address to contact the relevant people directly.

We are getting more and more people actually calling to tell us "there is a problem with your site", "your site has a virus" etc ...

Its REALLY annoying !

deevey

Many Many weeks on, and finally the sanctions have been lifted off our site !!!

It "looks" like stopbadware.org were to blame (at least thats who got back to me telling me the site had been reviewed).

They had reviewed the site and informed me google had lifted its warning, i'd also popped the question in the firefox forums and contacted Adwords reps in google US and Ireland .... so not excatly sure who it was that finally made things right or contacted whoever needed contacting - none of the orgainizations in question have contact details and yet seem to rule the interweb ..... there really is something wrong with that.

Over 3 months this has been going on :rolleyes:

blue4ever

Good to see you are out of “gitmo” – very interesting site you found, as I am coming across more and more of the “stop go not further” types.

But the site policy is also interesting – its sites linking to you as well that might hammer you! See how it works below:
Good look
C

Although the Clearinghouse is hosted by StopBadware.org, the list of badware-distributing sites has been generated by our data partners.
Unless we indicate otherwise, websites in our clearinghouse have been examined by our partners, such as Google, and found by them to contain badware or links to badware. Sites marked with a “yellow circle” were reported to StopBadware by one or more partners (named in the column to the left of the site’s URL in Clearinghouse search results). ……
When StopBadware itself has tested a site, and has independently determined that the site contains or links to badware, the site is marked with a “red circle”.
Sites with an uncolored icon “white circle” are not currently being reported to StopBadware as bad. An uncolored icon should not, however, be interpreted as meaning that a site is clean – it simply means that none of our partners are currently reporting the site as bad.

deevey

Sites marked with a “yellow circle” were reported to StopBadware by one or more partners (named in the column to the left of the site’s URL in Clearinghouse search results). ……

Ironically it was google who was listed as the partner site that reported us in the first place and caused all this grief :rolleyes: ! We only have about 3 external links atm.