Cursed — and uncursed — by Google
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008You may have noticed recently that The Real Oregon was flagged by Google’s search index as a site containing potentially dangerous “badware,” or malicious software.
The good news is, we took Google’s warning to heart and were able, in the end, to track down and eliminate the offending code, which was a couple snippets that had been injected into one or two pages by some slimy web invader. We’re clean once more, we’ve updated our security to prevent a recurrence, and Google has now officially lifted the warning.
The bad news is that, other than alerting website owners that there is something wrong, Google refuses ever to tell you exactly what is wrong with your website.
Their rationale for this is that if they ever told people what the rules were, bad people would be able to work around them. So there you have it. You have broken our rule, and we can’t tell you what the rule is. But if you ever want to get traffic from Google again, you’d better shape up.
All this means that it takes days of trial and error to figure out what is going on (especially when you’re not, let’s just say, a computer professional) as opposed to a few minutes to locate the evil code snippets that Google had already identified. One supposes Kafka sits on their board of directors.
OK, enough whining. The Real Oregon is back up and running and is safe and sound and is, once more, a Friend of Google.
