• SearchCommander, Thursday, October 25, 2007 1:30 PM

Scott Hendison recounts an experience that search blogger Shimon Sandler recently had with seemingly being "blackballed" by Google. When Sandler's site was listed in the SERPs, a "this site may harm your computer" message appeared below the title. Sandler railed against the search giant for what he felt was an unwarranted label that would kill his traffic and tarnish his reputation.

Naturally, Sandler thought it had something to do with his links (and the much ballyhooed PageRank update) - but his site had actually been hijacked by Adware and Spyware hackers. Hendison found out by examining some code that Sandler's blog had uploaded to his computer after a visit.

Sandler took steps to remove the badware, and is now working to get his blog removed from the harmful site list. Hendison cautions Webmasters to check every third-party, open source application on their site to make sure that there's no malicious code that could be getting them blackballed.

Read the whole story at SearchCommander »