BrowserFame reports the latest “nightly channel” of the Firefox browser, version 19, is warning browser users when it appears someone is hijacking the search engine results. This is to warn users when they may be “falling victim” to “search hijacking” according to the feature page. The page goes on to explain how the feature works […]
Almost two of every three malicious redirects in major search engines are found on Bing, according to a new report from the web security firm Sophos. Looking at data “from the last couple of weeks,” Sophos found that 65 percent of malicious search results that its web appliance blocked were from Bing. Google was responsible […]
Hey Emma Watson fans: Be really careful about clicking on those search results. McAfee, the security technology company, says Watson is 2012’s most dangerous celebrity to search for — replacing Heidi Klum, who held that title last year. According to McAfee’s Most Dangerous Celebrities study, searches related to Watson have a 12.6 percent chance of […]
Google’s security blog announced today several updates on how they have been addressing malware and hacked sites on the internet. Google said that between 12 and 14 million search queries per day return warnings that at least one of the results listed in the Google search results were compromised. Google has two types of labels […]
Google’s head of the webspam team, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter that they have sent out new message notifications to 20,000 web sites that are hacked. Specifically, Google sent these messages to sites doing “weird redirects.” I’ve personally seen a spike in the number of sites redirecting from their web site to a non-authorized site […]
Some of those who use Microsoft security software received a security patch a couple days ago that lead to malware warnings for users trying to visit Google.com. Softpedia posted a picture of the warning. Microsoft quickly learned about the issue on their support forums and issued a patch yesterday to address the issue. Microsoft didn’t […]
Duane Forrester announced on the Bing Search blog a major upgrade to Bing Webmaster Tools. He said this is their biggest update since the Honey Badger update from June. The key updates and changes include: Expanded Crawl Details: This includes showing inbound links for any URL including 300, 400 & 500 codes. Plus URLs listed […]
Saying that it wants to help website owners prioritize their work, Google has added a new “site health” view to the Webmaster Tools home page. The next time you visit Webmaster Tools, Google will show the sites in your account sorted with those in need of work at the top. Here’s a screenshot of Google’s […]
Google has completely redone the spam report form inside of Google Webmaster Tools, and in announcing it on Twitter tonight, Matt Cutts called it “the biggest refresh of our spam report form in, oh, say 10 years.” If you’re logged in to Webmaster Tools, the new spam report page is accessible at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1. And calling […]
Do a search on Google, and you might get an unexpected surprise. A big notice at the top of your results warning that your computer has been infected with malware. Here’s an example of how it looks: What malware? Produced by whom? Google’s not giving any details there yet, simply blogging: This particular malware causes […]
Russian search engine Yandex has launched an English-language version of Yandex.Webmaster, its suite of webmaster tools. The service can be reached at webmaster.yandex.com. If you’ve used the Google and/or Bing webmaster portals, Yandex’s will be familiar to you. On sign-up, users have five options to confirm site ownership: HTML file, meta tag, text file, WHOIS […]
Search on Google for any domains that match [site:co.cc] and you will find no matches. That is right, Google has removed, deindexed, banned and penalized any site using a co.cc subdomain. Why? As I noted, Google’s Matt Cutts explained on Google + that Google reserves the right if they “see a very large fraction of […]
Bas van den Beld received a new notification from Google Webmaster Tools that has never been seen before. The notification informs those who are running outdated WordPress installations to update them to the latest version. Here is a screen shot: Matt Cutts of Google confirmed the new notifications via Twitter saying, “we’re kicking off a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Impacted By Google’s Panda Update? Google Asks You To Consider This… Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, published a blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog named More guidance on […]
Facebook is not testing a second search box on its website and says anyone who sees such a thing might be the victim of malware or some other kind of third-party app. Earlier today, an article on All Facebook showed a user-submitted screenshot that included a second search box adjacent to the regular search at […]
With much of the world’s focus on the tragic earthquake in Japan, Internet security watchers are warning about dangerous web pages showing up in some quake-related search results. Trend Micro reported earlier this morning that malware sites had started targeting search terms shortly after the quake hit. As shown in the image above, Trend Micro […]
Yes, Google uses data from its Google Toolbar to improve its search results. But no, Google reasserts, it doesn’t use its toolbar to mine search behavior on other search engines in the way that Bing does.
Click Forensics quarterly report on overall click fraud was released for the fourth quarter of 2010. They said the click fraud rate dropped from 22.3 percent in the previous quarter to 19.1% in the fourth quarter of 2010. This is the first decline in click fraude reported by Click Forensics since Q2 2009. As you […]
Matt Cutts of Google announced on the Google Webmaster Blog that they have added a new notification for hacked sites to the search results. Google had malware notifications in the search results since 2007, but now Google is adding a notification for searchers to be aware that the site they may click on is hacked. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Maps Aggregates Midterm Election Forecasts Google has joined forces with a handful of political web sites to track forecasts for the upcoming U.S. mid-term elections. Those forecasts are available now […]
Google has twice as much malware in its search results as Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. That’s one of the findings in the Barracuda Labs 2010 Midyear Security Report, which will be presented tomorrow at the DEFCON 18 hacking conference tomorrow in Las Vegas. Barracuda Labs says it studied the four search engines for about […]
A blog post from cloud security company Zscaler suggests that some Google searches recently returned results with 90% malicious links, and the spammers are using Google Trends to do it. The example used in the post is a search for [tri energy], a phrase that was the hottest search on Google Trends on Friday, April […]
Michael VanDeMar has documented possible evidence that Google is using fake referrers, possibly to detect forms of spam. Michael said the GoogleBot is being cloaked and is sending fake referrers for keywords the site is not related to and has no chance in ranking for. Bing has been doing this for years, fixed the issue […]
CNet News reports that spammers and scammers are exploiting Google Doodles. As you can imagine, there are many people who click on the Google Doodle from the Google home page. Clicking on the logo will trigger a search result in Google. If you look at Google Hot Trends for yesterday, you will see that the […]
Google has written two spam related posts over the Thanksgiving period on the Google Webmaster Central Blog tackling the issue of comment spam. The first post focuses on the futility of comment spam, saying: At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is […]
Saying the host site was serving malware to users, Google has removed a controversial photo of First Lady Michelle Obama from Google Image Search. The site itself, however, remains listed in Google web search results without any visible malware warning. Welcome to the murky world of free speech, politics, and Google. It began last week, […]
Oh, the irony: The People’s Daily, the main newspaper of China’s Communist Party, says Google censored its web site by adding a malware warning to search result listings for the newspaper’s book section. The paper says the malware warning appeared after it ran an article about a Chinese group that has suggested Google’s book search […]
Google Webmaster Tools has just launched a “labs” section, where you’ll find new features that may be early in the development cycle and not quite as robust as the rest of the tools. The features available so far are Fetch as Googlebot, which lets you see exactly what Googlebot is served when it requests a […]
Danger, thy name is Jessica Biel! No, we’re not turning Search Engine Land into a celebrity gossip blog … we’re talking about the risks of searching online for certain celebrities. And, according to a McAfee report issued today, Jessica Biel is the most dangerous celebrity on the web, passing last year’s master of search disaster, […]
Somewhere online right now there’s a music fan who’s big on free downloads, likes Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” but doesn’t know the lyrics, is looking for free ringtones, uses MySpace, likes to play solitaire and wants the latest game cheats. Like many of us, s/he uses a search engine to find all of these things. […]
And so real-time search begets real-time spam. We knew this would happen, but it’s annoying and becoming a growing problem. Question is, will Twitter do anything about it, beginning with removing its “Trends” feature?I got an up close & personal look at how bad Twitter “trend spam” has become when this week, our SMX Advanced […]
The Live Search blog posted a comprehensive guide on how to determine if your site is penalized in Live Search and if so, what actions you can take to remedy the issue. I’ll highlight some of the key points in this excellent blog post. Microsoft said, “most webmasters who get penalized know why it happened.” […]
In the past day or so, I have spotted at least four somewhat major bugs with Google’s various products. They include Google sending dozens of unwanted SMS messages to thousands of users, Google’s safe filter not working properly, Google News using an unusually large font size and Google Docs has a major spam issue as […]
Ask.com has partnered with Symantec to include a new “Safe Search” feature into the Norton 360 security suite, integrated into the Norton toolbar that is part of the suite. When a search is run from the toolbar, results are safety-rated by Symantec using a color-coded icon, to flag sites or sections of sites that may […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
400,000 search queries on Google Video lead to poisoned results and may lead users to download malicious software. That’s according to a Trend Micro blog post this weekend reported today by The Register. Trend Micro believes this “blackhat SEO poisoning” comes from a group that maintains multiple domains with “keyword-riddled pages” that often appear on […]
Earlier today, Google started placing malware warnings next to every site listed. TechCrunch has an excellent screenshot, and there’s much discussion on Techmeme. As part of its malware blocking system, this also meant anyone trying to reach a site by clicking on a link from Google were instead routed to a “do you really want […]
News flash folks, Google AdWords is not perfect and can be exploited. There are times when people can go into the AdWords system and trick Google into serving up ads for phishing sites and malware downloads. Yes, this happens and happens often enough. I am not trying to depend Google but they probably automatically approve […]
Recently, Microsoft Live Search added malware warnings to their search results. If a searcher clicks a result that Microsoft has detected contains malware, a popup warns then not to proceed to the site. As Matt noted yesterday, Google and Yahoo! also provide malware warnings to searchers. How can you find out if Microsoft has flagged […]
MSN’s Live Search has announced the addition of malware warnings to their search results pages. In doing so, Live Search joins Google and Yahoo in taking a proactive stance against potentially dangerous sites; Google began adding malware warnings in early 2007. Yahoo added SearchScan alerts in May of this year. The Live Search implementation is […]