Google Webmaster Tools fails to consistently notify people after flagging a site with malware, and this is costing people visitors, sales, and time, along with some inconvenience and embarrassment thrown in for good measure.
They flag sites for malware in the search results, they flag sites at clickthrough before users get there, and they flag sites deeper into WMT after clicking the domain, but they do not consistently notify the WMT account holder on the main messages screen, and that’s a big problem.
I have Webmaster Tools set to forward messages to the associated Gmail address, where I have a filter set up that labels, then forwards the WMT messages to 3 others, and my own main email addy’s.
We CAN’T miss an important message, so we have things set up correctly, and today, my regular email had nothing filter / forwarded, and here are all 2019 messages from them in the Gmail box.
This is today, and you can see there is NO MESSAGE
Then I got an IM from someone telling me that there was a message in our Webmaster Tools account about a possible outage (nothing about malware), so I logged in and saw this one message.
Note that the message forwarding IS set up correctly:
I checked the site that was supposedly down, and it was up – crisis averted – However, far more important…
This message didn’t get forwarded to my email – why?
While I was in Webmaster Tools, I then poked around in a couple of other domains, and on the third one I looked at, there was a big red malware stripe!
Malwware?!? – I got no email forwarded, NOR did I get a message inside my main WMT message screen!
Then I did a quick Google search for the company name, and whammo, the damage is done. there’s the warning right above the description tag.
Then I clicked through the search result, and sure enough, I got the “Don’t go here – it’s dangerous!!!” screen.
Dear Google,
A lot of people in this industry are paid a lot of money to take care of these things PROactively, and you have been kind enough to give us the technology, but it’s BROKEN! Can you please fix this?
Google has been sporadically missing these for at least three months now, and I can’t even find any threads about it or anyone bitching about it besides me, so I figured I’d post here too…
Has anyone else seen this? – besides Todd Mintz 😉
Scott Hendison is the CEO of Search Commander, Inc. and a recovering affiliate marketer. He is also one of the founding board members of SEMpdx. Find out more about him at his website, SearchCommander.com.
Yes – this happened to my client twice, once in September and again in October. Very embarrassing and certainly a hit to their business. They ended up moving to a new host, convinced that the host they were using wasn’t protecting their site well enough. So far so good, but the several days of downtime wasn’t a good thing.