The head of Google’s Web spam team says that the company has pushed warning messages to some 20,000 Web site owners that their sites may be compromised and are performing “weird” redirections, possibly to malicious Web sites.
Matt Cutts used a Twitter message on Tuesday to announce that the company sent “your might be hacked’ messages to the sites, which are in “dozens of different languages.” The notices from the company’s Search Quality Team, are visible on the Web sites in question and warn web masters that their site “may be hacked” and that JavaScript may have been injected into the site to “redirect users to malicious sites.”
“You should check your source code for any unfamiliar JavaScript and in particular any files containing “eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,r). The malicious code may be placed in HTML, JavaScript or PHP files so it’s important to be thorough in your search,” Google warns.
A search turned up only a handful of non-english Web sites displaying the warning text, though Cutts said that 20,000 Webmasters received the notice.
It’s not the first time Google has taken action to weed out compromised Web sites from those that may turn up in search results. In July, 2011, the company removed Web sites hosted on .co.cc free Web hosting service from its search results, saying that because such a large percentage of the sites on that free hosting provider are low-quality or spammy.
Studies have shown that, despite the company’s best efforts, malicious and suspicious Web sites are often able to use search engine optimization to slip past Google’s filters and wind up on search results lists, and that the search engine giant flags only half of all the malicious links rendered by its search engine.
