If you’re seeing a “malware warning” when clicking through to FeedBlitz this morning, yikes, that can be scary. For the record, rest assured, we are safe; we have a review pending with Google this morning. Meanwhile it IS safe to click through, FeedBlitz itself hasn’t been damaged and isn’t sharing malware.
What happens is that Google’s search bots visit links on the web, and one of the things they do is report not only compromised sites (not FeedBlitz!), but sites that link to compromised sites. With our extensive email archives and tens of thousands of feeds, sometimes FeedBlitz will link to a third party site that becomes infected (almost always a site linked to in one of our client’s posts, so two steps removed, as it were). In that case a URL here gets flagged by Google in Webmaster Tools, because we track all clicks to generate metrics. It’s that which makes us appear to be part of the problem, when we’re not, because that tracking has to run through a feedblitz.com site first for it to work.
We check these flagged links daily, and update our list of blocks, so that we don’t redirect your and our visitors to bad places on the Web, as first discussed here.
Overnight, it seems that Google’s bots determined that several poorly maintained sites that some of our publishers link to were bad. That’s OK, it’s routine, we deal with that daily. What isn’t OK is that their algorithms somehow decided that FeedBlitz itself was possibly bad. We aren’t, obviously, but that means until the review completes (up to 24 hours) some folks will see an unpleasant warning in the browsers. That’s crappy and I’m sorry. It happens to the best of us now and again, it’s part of the hazards of being in this industry.
We all want a safer, trustworthy web. Sometimes the automation can be overzealous with downstream freakout results. That stinks. But I am confident that this will be done in less than a day.
Meanwhile, all is well, truly. It’s safe to click on a FeedBlitz feed or link, and the warnings will be gone soon.
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