When Google recently changed their modifiers on how they flag sites that may have been hacked, there definitely seems to be an issue with the specific keywords that are present on a page. And these typically spammed keywords alone, without the presence of any other typical signs of a hacked site, are enough to triggered with “This site may be hacked” warnings.
When sites first began getting falsely flagged last week, it was many adult sites that were caught in the new hacked page classifiers. But now more and more sites outside of the adult industry are tripping the “may be hacked” flag as well, and many of the sites are using the same non-adult keywords that typically we see when sites get hacked. But again, these false positives only began happening after the new classifiers for hacked sites rolled out.
One of the users who has triggered this hacked warning is actually the owner of an Ebay Store, and it resides on eBay as one of their store listings – a store that offers extremely little customization for users to make.And while it seems other eBay stores are listed just fine without any warnings, this particular one has been flagged.
Unless eBay has gotten creative about their SEO once again, there shouldn’t be any issues where this would be flagged, other than it has keywords typically used in spam. Google’s own safe browsing diagnostic tool shows no suspicious activity in the last 90 days on stores.eBay.com.
Unfortunately, many of these websites that are showing the warning in the Google search result show no issues whatsoever when viewed in the Google Webmaster Yools. So if you are in the market area that tends to use a lot of keywords that a lot of spammers that are hacking blogs are using as well, you’ll want to be hypervigilant about checking the search results to ensure that your site has not been falsely flagged. Unless you someone telling you about it, you might not realize it until you start investigating why your traffic has dropped.
There are still many reports coming in about these false flags, but it is unclear if it is a rolling update to their hacked page classifiers, or if it is just taking longer for some webmasters to notice their sites have been flagged, especially with no warnings showing up in Google Webmaster Tools.
If your site has been falsely flagged, Google’s John Mueller is asking you to fill out this form so they can fix and improve it.
Jennifer Slegg
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Rod says
My site is one of those unfortunate sites which Google has wrongly flagged as a hacked site – I have checked the site thoroughly with lots of anti-spam tools and the irony is that no spam messages appear in my WMT. So how are we supposed to know if Google has not flagged our site by mistake which definitely happens to be the case with my site.
It’s now a few days since I have filled the form and nothing has been done by Google as yet – It is really very irresponsible of Google for having destroyed my site’s reputation and made it lose lots of traffic without seeing this issue through properly in a professional manner.
Jennifer Slegg says
Did you fill out the form as well?