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.
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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