Google has begun showing malware warnings to webmasters from within their Google Analytics accounts.

This change is good because while many webmasters use Google Analytics, not all of them are signed up for Google webmaster tools yet, or it might just be one member of the team with access to it, while more members have access to Google Analytics data.

The warnings will show up through the regular Analytics notification alerts which show up in the top right hand corner when you’re logged into your Google Analytics account. When you click on the notification, it will display the malware warning.

This is a great addition for Google, as it increases the number of people connected to the website that will be alerted to the problem. Not everyone does the search for their own sites in Google, so relying on seeing as “This site may be hacked” notification in the search result isn’t always the best way to learn of the problem.

This change has already gone live in Google Analytics.

There have been some problems recently with Google changing how malware is detected, which caused many websites to be incorrectly flagged as being hacked.  However, it seems it was mostly restricted to websites that are in highly spammed keyword areas where Google was misidentifying these types of keywords on a page naturally as being added through a hack.