November 4, 2009 by Jay Smith
Google Labs has struck again with yet another useful tool entering beta testing on Webmaster Tools. It’s called Malware Details and it’s basically a godsend for anyone worried about hacking/illicitly installed Malware on their site. It works by crawling the site and flagging anything that it feels is malicious.
The really useful thing about this code is that it comes straight from Google, who basically decide what is or isn’t malicious code anyway, so it’s great peace of mind for a site to know that they won’t be penalised, as Google itself has given their site a clean bill of health… Or not.
This is a very timely release from Google – webmasters across the world are getting increasingly worried about the prospect of malware being installed on their sites. This is mainly due to a renewed focus from the major search engines on penalising sites that are suspected of having malware installed. It doesn’t matter who put it there, if you have any malware at all installed it is likely that any major search engine/browser will be informing users of this fact.
Whether it’s with a small note on your site’s search results, or a big red screen like Google Chrome helpfully provides it’s not something you want site users to be seeing.
Google are at pains to point out that Malware Details is not a cure in itself, rather a first step in ridding your site of malware. The programme works by giving you snippets of code it considers malicious, it is then up to you to find and remove the code.
If you suspect there maybe malware on your site – or even if you don’t – we highly recommend that you take advantage of this new tool. The main reason being that if Google are putting money into helping people identify and fix malware issues, they are probably also gearing up for a renewed push to punish those who have malware on their sites. The old Google carrot and stick approach.
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