Some jerk gave me a red flag for my main website. Why? Because it's about Internet marketing products. He said that my site promoted scams and was phishing. http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/theinternetscashmachine.com It's ridiculous. I would never promote phishing and I try to do everything to come under Google webmasters guidelines. I don't know if it affects Google ranking because I get a pretty good stream of traffic from Google daily. But my PR has been sitting at a low 2 for some time even though I have a couple of PR 5 dofollow backlinks. I also have pages within the site with higher PR than the main page. If I ever find that Dean guy I'm going to kick his ......
It seems there are a lot of false positives on Site Advisor. I like it, use it, and recommend it. It has great potential. I do submit some sites for testing (mainly my own), but I tend not to rate, (except my own). As for the false positives, well.. the sooner they figure out what to do with the over zealous raters the better. As for this Dean guy.. Obviously he has nothing better to do. I found this http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/siteadvisor.com/msgpage?page=7#reviews I think he even rated SiteAdvisor as a bad site Cheers James
SiteAdvisor's test methodology is seriously flawed. It gave my site a red "dangerous downloads" rating on the basis of a false positive in one download. This could have been avoided if they used more than one scanner to check suspicious files. It is totally irresponsible to publish warnings about a site on the basis of such a test. Anyone with any experience of anti-malware tools knows false positives are not uncommon. The problem is compounded by the fact Yahoo! is now publishing these ratings in its search results, so you don't need to have installed SiteAdvisor to see them. And only companies big enough to afford corporate lawyers seem to manage to get these ratings corrected quickly. See my blog for the story on what happened to us.
great story, well written. You are right, that is a very big flaw in site advisor.. I find it ironic that McAfee has flagged your site as red (Danger) for having software available for download from RegNow on your site, but has only flagged RegNow's site with a yellow (Caution). If that software (Spyware Doctor from RegNow) is the only reason you have been flagged as red (which it seems to be). Then why do you still offer it for download?, why not just link to RegNow's site so people can download it from there? I did not know that yahoo had started flagging results using SiteAdvisor as well. (shows how much I use Yahoo) Well if this Spyware Doctor is as highly respected as you say in your blog, then maybe they should have there lawyers contact McAfee about this "false positive" situation. However, that may turn out to be quite hard, as Alexa still remains flagged as yellow by siteadvisor. Cheers James
Yes, I find it a bit ironic that RegNow only gets a yellow flag for the same file. I offer it for download because it is a good and popular product that earns money for me if people buy a license for Spyware Doctor after they download it. There is nothing wrong with the file so why should I remove the link to it? I can't see McAfee compensating me for the value of lost sales commissions. RegNow is lumbering into action so hopefully something will done about it. But what really needs to be done is something that will stop McAfee from going around making these untrue warnings about innocent sites. The false positive could probably be removed just by rebuilding the file in a slightly different way. But that just means it will happen again to someone else, some time, with a different file. McAfee needs to be made to fix its system so that it does not happen at all. They really need to be made to contact webmasters before putting the curse on their site, so that something like this can be dealt with before it can cause harm to a site that actually has nothing wrong at all.