Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

Monday, August 13, 2007

It's been a while since we published this blog post. Some of the information may be outdated (for example, some images may be missing, and some links may not work anymore). Read our up-to-date documentation about malware.

In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for site owners of affected sites—suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post "About badware warnings" as well as the stopbadware discussion group. Now, Webmaster Tools provides malware reviews.

If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it without a malware label in our search results:

1. View a sample of the dangerous URLs on your site in Webmaster Tools.
2. Make any necessary changes to your site according to StopBadware.org's Security tips.
3. New: Request a malware review from Google and we'll evaluate your site.
4. New: Check the status of your review.
   • If we feel the site is still harmful, we'll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous URLs
   • If we've determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the near future (usually within 24 hours).

We encourage all site owners to become familiar with Stopbadware's malware prevention tips. If you have additional questions, please review our documentation or post to the discussion group. We hope you find this new feature in Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems, and thanks for your diligence for awareness and prevention of malware.

Written by Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Anti-Malware Team