Has Google been hacked? Or has the snake swallowed its own tail?
Google has recently implemented a new feature to try and detect when a site goes “bad” warning users within its SERPS (search engine results pages) that the site is potentially harmful. This redirected users to a page informing them that the site they may be about to visit is harmful.
At time of writing it looks like this has gone *badly* wrong. It’s not yet apparent whether this is the result of a hack (to exploit the way Google determines this) or simply just something wrong at the plex, but all Results ( including results on Google’s own domain have) gone majorly bad. Take a look at this screenshot.
This isn’t the first time that they have got things wrong with this. HeatWorld.com – a UK weekly magazine, was recently branded with the “potentially dangerous” brush – and many webmasters have been critical of the results.
Digital Point has been active with many users also reporting that their site was “potentially dangerous” even though it wasn’t.
I’ll keep you up dated on this as we hear exactly what has went wrong. I’ve twittered MattCutts (Head of Google’s spam team) to try and hear what the deal is.
Update – Google have released a statement – appears just to have been human error at the ‘plex
The problem is fix’ed.
don’t know what happen though
Anonymous
It’s a hack.
Someone twittered a link to it, and after I clicked on it, all results came up harmful – even after browser restart.
Had to delete all cookies and restart firefox. All good now.
M.
Mark Marshall