Just recently, a number of site owners and webmasters have received notifications that their respective websites have been hacked and classified as “dangerous” on search result pages. If you’ve had a similar problem, don’t worry. It might be Google’s fault, not yours.
Google has released a new hacked page classifier to provide early warning for users who might be visiting websites that have been attacked by hackers. However, it seemed that the classifier had a bug that caused it to flag and misclassified certain websites as hacked. A warning label under the clickable link in the Google search results to their site was placed, potentially discouraging any user from visiting them.
The tech giant acknowledged the existence of the bug and apologised to site owners for any problem it might have caused. It said it is doing its best to solve the problem. “We’re slowly rolling out a new hacked page classifier (not CMS specific) and noticed a small number of misclassifications. We’re sorry for any trouble this may have caused — we are working on addressing the issues,” a spokesperson for Google was quoted as saying.
To determine if your website has been misclassified by the tech giant, the first thing you need to do is do a quick search for your site on Google. If you see a line of blue text underneath the title tag that reads “This site may be hacked,” and you are quite sure that your site is not hacked, it is very likely that your site has been misclassified. If you don’t see that line, then you don’t have any problem.
In case your site has been mislabelled, here’s what you should do. You should visit Google’s support page and fill out a form. Then, someone from the company will review it and remove the label if your site is indeed safe and hasn’t been hacked. Take note, however, that Google did not specify how long it would take them to remove the label. Until then, you have no choice but to wait it out. Also, it is expected that your click through rate on the search listing would take a huge hit and drop heavily.
Meanwhile, Google’s John Mueller encouraged website owners to also hire someone who is experienced in working with hacked sites to determine if their site is really hacked or not. Otherwise, it could be a huge problem if it isn’t really Google’s fault that the hacked label is showing.
