Today we’ve added a new notification to our search results that helps people know when a site may have been hacked. We’ve provided notices for malware for years, which also involve a separate warning page. Now we’re expanding the search results notifications to help people avoid sites that may have been compromised and altered by a third party, typically for spam. When a user visits a site, we want her to be confident the information on that site comes from the original publisher. Here’s what the notification looks like: Clicking the “This site may be compromised†link brings you to an article in our Help Center which explains more about the notice. Meanwhile, clicking the result itself brings you to the target website, as expected. We use a variety of automated tools to detect common signs of a hacked site as quickly as possible. When we detect something suspicious, we’ll add the notification to our search results. We’ll also do our best to contact the site’s webmaster via their Webmaster Tools account and any contact email addresses we can find on the webpage. We hope webmasters will also appreciate these notices, because it will help you more quickly discover when someone may be abusing your site so you can correct the problem. Of course, we also understand that webmasters may be concerned that these notices are impacting their traffic from search. Rest assured, once the problem has been fixed, the warning label will be automatically removed from our search results, usually in a matter of days. You can also request a review of your site to accelerate removal of the notice. If you see this notification appearing on your site’s listing, please take a look at the instructions in our Help Center to learn how you can begin to address the problem. Together, we can make the web a safer place. Source http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-hacked-site-notifications-in-search.html
Another good improvement for users. There are a lot of users that got sucked into a hacked page that lead them to some rotten website in the end. Google should add notification about phishing page as well.
I guess it's an idea, not sure how well it will work out. If they are going to have something like that in the search results it would be helpful if they made the "This site may be compromised" link a little more obvious, a different color that stands out more, or larger text. The way it is right now you almost don't even see or notice it. Since the article says: Clicking the “This site may be compromised†link brings you to an article in our Help Center which explains more about the notice. Meanwhile, clicking the result itself brings you to the target website, as expected. If you don't notice the “This site may be compromised†and click the result itself you will end up on the site anyway. Maybe it will help the site owner more than the person searching or something.
This is a great idea. Rather than increasing your bounce rate and potentially lowering your site's SERPS, you'll just have a drop in visitors until you get your site fixed. I'm a bit worried about false positives though.