How Checking Your Back-Links Can Cause Your Heart To Stop

I got the shock of my life yesterday when doing a links check on Google for one of the sites I work on I saw this warning message under the Title “This site may harm your computer.”

WTF! Immediately my mind began to race. What have I uploaded recently? What did I link to? How is this possible? It was only when I looked again that I saw the cause of the problem.

On further investigation I noticed that the link in question was coming from w3csites.com and by clicking on the warning messsage Google advised me that:

“We want our users to feel safe when they search the web, and we’re continuously working to identify dangerous sites and increase protection for our users. This warning message appears with search results that we’ve identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer:”

Google Clarification

Now, I have always thought that W3CSites was a good site to submit to – they have an abundance of smart looking CSS driven sites to get you inspired plus they give some good linkage back to your site. So what on earth have they been up to?

If anybody can fill in the gray areas I would be most thankful. For one, I aint clicking their link to find out that’s for sure.